International Relations and Area Studies: Debates, Methodologies and Insights from Different World Regions (Contributions to International Relations) 3031396545, 9783031396540

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Contributions to International Relations

Silvia D’Amato Matteo Dian Alessandra Russo   Editors

International Relations and Area Studies Debates, Methodologies and Insights from Different World Regions

Contributions to International Relations

This book series offers an outlet for cutting-edge research on all areas of international relations. Contributions to International Relations (CIR) welcomes theoretically sound and empirically robust monographs, edited volumes and handbooks from various disciplines and approaches on topics such as IR-theory, international security studies, foreign policy, peace and conflict studies, international organization, global governance, international political economy, the history of international relations and related fields. All titles in this series are peer-reviewed.

Silvia D’Amato · Matteo Dian · Alessandra Russo Editors

International Relations and Area Studies Debates, Methodologies and Insights from Different World Regions

Editors Silvia D’Amato Institute of Security and Global Affairs Leiden University The Hague, The Netherlands

Matteo Dian Department of Political and Social Sciences University of Bologna Bologna, Italy

Alessandra Russo School of International Studies & Department of Sociology and Social Research University of Trento Trento, Venezia, Italy

ISSN 2731-5061 ISSN 2731-507X (electronic) Contributions to International Relations ISBN 978-3-031-39654-0 ISBN 978-3-031-39655-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39655-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

Bridging the Gaps Between International Relations and Area Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Silvia D’Amato, Matteo Dian, and Alessandra Russo

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Global and Post-western IR, Area Studies, and the Rise of China: Promises and Limits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Matteo Dian

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Africa in the Study of International Relations: The (Double) Realist Bias of Global IR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Luca Raineri and Edoardo Baldaro

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Middle Eastern Studies and International Relations: Toward a Transformative Dialogue? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Irene Costantini and Ruth Hanau-Santini

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Regionalisms as a Middle-Path Between Area Studies and IR. A Political Sociology of Central American Regionalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kevin Parthenay

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Connecting the Local and the Global: International Practice Theory as a Trading Zone for International Relations and Area Studies Scholars . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chiara De Franco

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International Relations in the Margins. Education for Peace, Education Against Extremism in Kosovo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 Ervjola Selenica Political Ecologies of Landmines in the Borderlands of Myanmar . . . . . . 129 Francesco Buscemi

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Contents

Dyadic Approach and Quantitative Analysis: Easing the Dialogue Between IR and Area Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151 Paolo Rosa In Lieu of a Conclusion: The Ongoingness of a Debate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161 Silvia D’Amato, Matteo Dian, and Alessandra Russo Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171

Bridging the Gaps Between International Relations and Area Studies Silvia D’Amato , Matteo Dian , and Alessandra Russo

Abstract This chapter sets the scene for the volume International Relations and Area Studies: debates, methodologies and insights from different world regions by setting out the research questions and structure of this edited volume. Specifically, this chapter reviews the state of the art of the dialectics interweaving International Relations and Area Studies. In doing so, it focuses on tracing the genealogy of these debates, identifying the actors engaged with them, as well as, mapping those sites where such transdisciplinary knowledge is produced and circulated. Overall, this chapter provides a twofold contribution: first, we provide an account of the globalization of knowledge production and circulation that has also increasingly decentred, valuing local peculiarities and epistemological traditions beyond the Western academia. Second, we assess and discuss how Western and non-Western academics have contoured concepts which demand and entail site-intensive techniques of inquiry, exposure to complexities on the grounds, ethnographic sensitivity, and, at the same time, comparative endeavours going beyond area specialisms.

The contributions included in this chapter and Chaps. 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8 of this volume were partially published in the Special Issue of the Italian Political Science Review titled ‘Reaching for allies? The dialectics and overlaps between International Relations and Area Studies in the study of politics, security and conflicts’ (vol. 52 n. 2) https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/italian-pol itical-science-review-rivista-italiana-di-scienza-politica/issue/64D35748F0A69FFFF061772E7F7 31725. S. D’Amato (B) Institute for Global and Security Studies, University of Leiden, Leiden, Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] M. Dian Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy e-mail: [email protected] A. Russo School of International Studies & Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Trento, Trento, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. D’Amato et al. (eds.), International Relations and Area Studies, Contributions to International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39655-7_1

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1 Introduction The recent emergence of the “Global IR” agenda represents one of the last products of a long term effort to “broadening, diversifying, and globalizing” the disciplinary field of International Relations incorporating “non-Western”, the “post-colonial”/ ”de-colonial” perspectives (Acharya & Buzan, 2007, 2019; Bilgin, 2008; Jones, 2006; Zarakol, 2010). In 2015, acting as President of the ISA itself, Amitav Acharya in his Presidential Address put forward the need for “a new agenda for international studies” that would have built on the past efforts to challenge IR’s Eurocentric limitations and shedding light on the worldviews, approaches, and perspectives of the ones having been marginalized, peripheralized, or even exoticized by Western academia—that is, the subaltern and indigenous voices relegated, depending on the history, to the East or South. This line of engagement has a longer historical journey: already in 1961 George Modelsky wrote “International Relations needs Area Study”; and IR theories have indeed benefited from interdisciplinary approaches for a long time (Aalto et al., 2011; Fawcett, 2017; Katzenstein, 2002; Long, 2011; Sil & Katzenstein, 2010; Teti, 2007). Further, not only the evolving debate on “Global IR” promises to breathe new life into joint intellectual enterprises and interdisciplinary efforts (Bilgin, 2016); the emergence of the field of “comparative regionalism”, too, is paving the way to a renewed dialogue between “regionally-oriented disciplinarists” (i.e., disciplinary scholars looking at regional phenomena, often in comparative terms) and “disciplineoriented regionalists” (i.e., area specialists drawing on theoretical frameworks from a particular discipline, Acharya, 2006). This edited volume collects theoretically innovative as well as empirically focused contributions on multiple “regional worlds”1 with the expectation to study the diverse nature of internationally relevant political agencies, security matters, and system of governance across the international system. Hence, this book presents both single-case and comparative case studies committed to expanding the horizons of both IR and Area Studies (AS), underlining their historical and contemporary interconnectedness. In particular, we are interested in exploring a number of questions that, we believe, remain still largely unexplored or rarely addressed in a comparative manner. For instance, how can we use and apply IR scholarship in the analysis of different international events across world regions? What can case studies from “Comparative Regionalism” and “Non-Western IR Theory” research agendas have to say about current international events? What can we learn from quatitative research when investigating the relationship between IR and AS scholarships? By addressing these questions via nine chapters, travelling from Africa, Europe, Middle East, Latin America, and Asia, this edited book represents an important contribution to the existing debate in a twofold way. First, this volume introduces a 1

Or, in the words of Thakur and Smith (2021), multiple “births” of International Relations, multiple disciplinary histories, and multiple voices and actors that have contributed to the development of “local” IRs and nonetheless have been subject to erasures and exclusions.

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number of innovative theoretical debates as well as methodological and epistemological puzzles, trying to unpack and reflect upon the way(s) international affairs are discussed and interpreted. Second, this volume offers an important empirical contribution by analysing these debates in a variety of case studies, questioning the way different areas of the world have been politically as well as cognitively constructed. Specifically, this volume includes contributions considering the “IR/AS dialectics” in terms of disciplinary development (e.g., Dian; Baldaro and Raineri; Costantini and Hanau Santini; Parthenay) and contributions empirically building bridges between IR and AS through case studies (e.g., Selenica; Buscemi). It features a chapter (Rosa) adding a layer to the debate: when building bridges between IR and AS, scholars are called to question the methodological divide between qualitative and quantitative framework. Finally, it also includes a chapter implicitly seeking to see “Europe” with an Area Studies mindset (De Franco), thus de-exoticizing and de-orientalizing the deep-seated meaning of Area Studies themselves. The aim of this introduction is to set the stage for the different contributions, by presenting the main rationale of the project and the theoretical starting points. Indeed, we proceed by first introducing main sources of contestation within international studies and we continue by exploring the methodological, pedagogical but also policy relevant implications of the abovementioned dialectics. However, we also provide an in-depth assessment of the interaction between the two disciplinary traditions as scholarly disciplines by focusing on brokers of debate and present data on academic collaboration via top ranked journals and main international conferences.2 Indeed, while calls for bridging these two disciplinary fields have resulted in different dynamics and inputs, we still know quantitively very little about shapes and formats of this dialectics. Finally, we conclude the introduction with an overview of the manuscript and by emphasizing expectations and added value of each chapter.

2 From Western Roots to Global IR? Cooperation with AS is probably a useful antidote for two of the major biases of contemporary IR theory: the American dominance and Eurocentrism. These two biases, we show in the following, are connected but distinct. The first is associated with the development of the discipline in the post war period, while the second has deeper historical and intellectual roots. Stanley Hofmann in the 1977 described IR theory as an “American discipline” (Hoffmann, 1977). The development of the discipline in the United States in the post war period was characterized by several elements. First, IR needed to be a social

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In doing this, our chapter seems to flow into a very current debate on how to empirically examine instances in which epistemic hierarchies and divides replicates or are instead overcome (Kaczmarska and Ortmann 2021).

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science. Consequently, the main assumption was the need to embrace a positivist and scientist epistemology and very often a quantitative and statistical methodology. The purpose of searching for covering laws and regularities was shared by most IR scholars, especially in the United States (Kratochwil, 2006; Li, 2019). Even those who disagreed with the use of quantitative methods and preferred to continue using qualitative and historical methodologies such as Morgenthau and Waltz, embraced the idea of finding universal “covering laws” and regularities. As underlined by Evelyn Goh, American IR, with its preference for positivism and the search for “covering laws” has promoted a “hyper-westernized framework of cognitive biases and normative assumptions” (Goh, 2019), regarding states’ behaviour, the stability of the system, balance of power, the nature of the international order, as well as epistemological assumptions the alleged neutrality of the knowledge produced by IR scholars (Colgan, 2019). Second, as clarified later, the US academia acquired since the late 1940s a centrality in terms of resources, number of scholars, proportion of highly ranked journals, and role of key associations and conferences that still endures today (Cheng & Brettle, 2019; Hendrix & Vreede, 2019; Lohaus & Wemheuer-Vogelaar, 2020; Wemheuer-Vogelaar et al., 2016). Third, the US dominance of the field universalized and naturalized another main development: considering IR theory as a subfield of political science rather than an autonomous discipline. This means that IR theory needed to meet the alleged standard of “scientificity” of political science, very often inspired by the reliance on statistical enquiry and large n (Bush, 2019; Walt, 1999). This has foreclosed the possibility of a mutual dialogue not only with Area Studies but also with cognate disciplines such as political philosophy, history, geography, and sociology. The search for neutrality and covering laws and the premium put on statistical significance has often created incentives to neutralize all the influence that could get in the way of the creation of allegedly neutral and verifiable theories. On the contrary, where IR has developed as an autonomous discipline, it has been able to continue a necessary and productive conversation with other social and human sciences (Levy, 1997; Rosenberg, 2016). In his article, Stanley Hoffmann points to another feature of IR theory at the time. As a social science, IR was considered useful to “solve problems” and bring about “solutions” both in terms of advice to the leadership, or to promotion of social arrangements that could foster the conditions of peace and development. This inspiration cut across the paradigms and approaches and could be found both among liberals who studied the link between democracy, development, and peace, or realists as Schelling that sought to apply the rational instruments of game theory to coercion and the deterrence (Hoffmann, 1977; Schelling, 1960, 1966). This inspiration to produce “usable knowledge” has largely got lost in contemporary IR, caught in the crossfire of different methodenstreits and great debates that have characterized the field. On the one hand, the positivist mainstream has further embraced the tendencies towards formalization and methodological “sophistication”, at the cost of losing relevance for the real world (Green, 2017; Nye, 2008; Walt, 1999). On the other hand, the part of the field that opposes the positivist mainstream tends to criticize the “problem solving” theories. Critical theorists in particular

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point out how mainstream theories have a “disciplining effect” on policies, fostering expectations, suppressing diversity, imposing intellectual and political uniformity. Mainstream theories are therefore considered to be an intellectual manifestation of a political and cultural hegemony, as mere superstructure of power. Consequently, large part of the anti-mainstream, particularly critical, post-structuralist, and post-positivist approaches, have considered their purpose that of deconstructing, criticizing, dismantling, and decolonizing (Capan, 2017; Jones, 2006; Sabaratnam, 2013; Seth, 2011; Tickner, 2013). It can be argued that this process was necessary for contemporary IR to recognize its own biases, its own limits, and the need to open to the ideas and the perspectives of different areas of the world. As it will be discussed in the next pages of this introduction, the critique represented an important step to address the other fundamental bias of contemporary IR, namely Eurocentrism. However, the centrality of pars denstruens, the effort to deconstruct, the idea that all theories have a disciplining effect, led to think that IR theory—as many other theories and field of inquiries—can have a problem-solving function and produce “usable knowledge” (Jackson, 2016). Eurocentrism is the second key bias for contemporary IR theory. This is only in part associated with the American dominance in the discipline. Positivism and preference for quantitative methods only reinforced existing tendencies to consider the European and Western institutions, and political and social development as universal. As John Hobson has argued, international theory largely constructs a series of Eurocentric conceptions of world politics […] it does not so much explain international politics in an objective, positivist and universalist manner but seeks, rather, to parochially celebrate and defend or promote the West as the proactive subject of, and as the highest or ideal normative referent in world politics. (Hobson, 2012, 1)

As it will be discussed by several of the chapters of this edited volume, the Eurocentric vision of international politics leads to embrace several assumptions, such as the “myth of Westphalia” and the “myth of 1919” (Bell, 2009; De Carvalho et al., 2011). Historiography of IR, as well as most undergraduate teaching tends to begin presenting 1948 and 1919 as key foundational dates. The peace of Westphalia in 1648 is considered as the first key benchmark date, or the first “big bang”. Allegedly, in that moment European states agreed on several key principles defining the modern international system, such as sovereignty and non-interference, the separation between State and Church, the equality between “Leviathans” (Blachford, 2020; Kayaoglu, 2010; Krasner, 1999; Osiander, 1994, 1999; Teschke, 2003). As Hans Morgenthau argued in its Politics among Nations that “the Treaty of Westphalia brought the religious wars to an end and made the territorial state the cornerstone of the modern states system” (Morgenthau, 1948, 252). 1648, as the birth year of the modern state, is also considered the final year of empires and other hierarchical forms of political organizations. Evidently, while within Europe, the principle of formal equality could seem realistic, the relations between European states and the rest of the world will remain characterized by formal

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and practical inequality for three more centuries, in the shape of imperialism and nonrecognition of the rights of non-European (non-Western; non-white; non-Christian) states to have their own statehood recognized (Zarakol, 2018). The myth of Westphalia has been completely internalized by Realist scholars in two steps. First, the vast majority of IR has been built on cases associated with the European, or in some cases Western, history. This has led to a strong “selection bias”, since theorists were conducting their research only on cases that reflected the key features of the Westphalia international politics: the presence of formally equal states, an intense security competition, a tendency to pursue “balance of power”. The tendency to look mostly at European modern history, or later at the competition between great powers in the Cold War as “empirical samples” has led to assume that the key features of the Westphalian system were universal and immutable, rather than historically contingent and associated to several economic, political, social, and ideological conditions. As a consequence, anarchy, equality, functional undifferentiation, and the primacy of security become key assumptions of realist international relations theory through the work of classic realists such as Morgenthau and Carr, and especially with the development of structural realisms (Carr, 2016; Mearsheimer, 2001; Morgenthau, 1948; Waltz, 1979). These assumptions left many significant questions unanswered. The most important regarded the reasons why in the three centuries between the Peace of Westphalia and the process of decolonization following World War 2, the vast majority of the interaction between the core of the system, constituted by great powers and other Westphalian, fully sovereign, behaving-like-units states and the rest of the world could not be explained using the analytical categories employed by realism. The imperialist world order that characterized the world in those three centuries could be described by elements of equality between European and Western states, but the relations between the European-Western core and the rest was clearly characterized by hierarchy, unevenness, and exploitation (Baldaro & Raineri; Buzan & Lawson, 2015; Mattern & Zarakol, 2018). The structural realist answer to this issue is, for the most part, that “it does not matter”. By putting the emphasis on power, structural realists and classic realists, assumed that international politics is a discipline that studies the interaction between great power, therefore is not necessarily concerned with the periphery of the system or with the fate of small states, people living in ungoverned spaces, or allegedly pre-modern forms of political organization. Kenneth Waltz for instance solved the issue of the global diffusion of the modern state arguing that the competition between states leads to socialization. This meant that those who would not conform to the logic of power and competition for security perish, while the others would continue to be involved in the immutable struggle for security and survival (Waltz, 1979). Other approaches sought to address this issue more systematically and more seriously. First generation of the English School promoted the idea of the “Expansion of the International Society”. From this point of view the key primary institutions of the international society, such as sovereignty, international law, war, and diplomacy

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were developed in Europe and later exported to the rest of the world (Bull & Watson, 1984; Buzan, 2014). Authors such as Hedley Bull, Adam Watson, and Martin White had the fundamental merit to bring the relationship between Europe and “the rest of the world” as well as at the centre of the theoretical debate, in a moment in which large part of the mainstream IR theory was focusing largely on concerns associated with topics and concerns associated with the realities of security competition of the Cold War. Nevertheless, this first step remains strongly anchored to a Eurocentric vision of international politics. The “expansion story” presented by the English school suffers from the same biases that characterized realist theorizing. First, it considers the process of globalization of the modern state as one of learning and socialization. In doing so it fails to provide any account of the colonial experience and its legacies, and to incorporate the unevenness and the relations of hierarchy that characterized that process.3 Moreover, it considers the expansion of the modern state and of the international society as a one-way process and not a dialectic process of creation of multiple modernities (Persaud & Sajed, 2018). The lack of attention to the periphery, imperialism, and the “colonial international politics” is associated with the second “myth of IR”, that of 1919. That year is both considered the foundational moment of the discipline, with the opening of the first IR department at the University of Wales at Aberystwyth and the beginning of the “first great debate” between utopian liberals and realists (Ashworth, 2002; Quirk & Vigneswaran, 2005; Schmidt, 2013). The myth of 1919 is instrumental to the exclusion of colonization and imperialism in two different ways. Firstly, it locates the birth of the discipline in a particular time and space in which the debate is exclusively centred on how to “solve” the problem of war, with realists such as Carr restating the harsh realities of power politics and utopian idealists pointing to legal and institutional arrangements. As de Carvalho Leira and Hobson point out IR theory as a discipline had already moved its first steps, as testified by the works of Norman Angel, John A. Hobson, Woodrow Wilson, as well as Vladimir E. Lenin. Furthermore, the urgency of “solving the problem of war” stemming from the conclusion of World War 1 tended to exclude an effort to theorize the role of imperialism and colonialism.4 Second, the myth of 1919 contributes to current biases of IR theory also in another way. Later reconstructions of the “first great debate” generally maintained that interwar idealism failed to prevent the rise of Nazism and contributed to World War 2, leading to ignore the realities of power and favouring policies such as the Chamberlain’s appeasement. Consequently, after 1945 realism became the dominant approach since it was willing to see things “as they are” and study them “scientifically”. In the following years, these assumptions merged with the emerging trends 3

Most recent developments of the English School largely overcome its initial Eurocentric biases and have produced a much more balanced account of the process of expansion of the international Society. See Keene (2002); for a synthesis, Buzan (2014). 4 A significant exception is the work of the Lenin and Hobson on the role of imperialism in the contemporary capitalist development and its role in the origin of World War 1.

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towards positivism, consolidating the tendency to equate realism, positivism, and “science” (Ashworth, 2006; Schmidt, 2002; Thies, 2002). As stated by Amitav Acharya in the ISA Presidential Address, in order to face the challenge of understanding an increasingly plural and diverse world, IR theory should seek to overcome both its existing biases and promote a dialogue with area studies (Acharya, 2016). In doing so both IR and area specialists face a number of challenges. The first one is probably the necessity of re-assessing the role of colonialism and its legacies. For IR theorists this entails an effort to expand both of the time-frame and the geographical scope of the studies. While early modern Europe has been the empirical historical reference for most theories of balance of power and security competition, the relations between core and periphery and the encounter with “the rest” have been much more marginal (examples are Cesa, 2010; Levy & Thompson, 2005; Schroeder, 1994). A recent and interesting example of this effort is the work of Barry Buzan and George Lawson on international politics in the nineteenth century and its consequence for the contemporary understanding of international politics (Buzan & Lawson, 2015). This is one of the most significant examples of works that seek to locate the relationship between core and periphery at the centre of IR theory, together with the horizontal dimension of competition between great powers (Chakrabarty, 2000; Osterhammel, 2014). This effort to incorporate the vertical dimension of international politics also leads to a renewed attention for the receiving end of imperialism and colonization. A new wave of studies has started to investigate the effects of colonialism and imperialism from the perspective of the people and the states that suffered from them. Seen from the perspective of Asia, African, Middle Eastern peoples and states, the age of empires was not simply a process of importation of costumes, rules, and norms, nor to socialization to the realities of international politics. It left deep traces on social and economic structures and it created forms of economic, and political dependency5 (Acemoglu et al., 2001; Michalopoulos & Papaioannou, 2016). Incorporating the legacies of imperialism and colonialism is crucial to understand contemporary non-Western perspectives on human rights, democracy, sovereignty, self-determination, and the nature of international politics more in general (Acharya, 2011a, 2011b; Acharya & Buzan, 2019; Pyle, 2007; Suzuki, 2009; Zarakol, 2010, 2018; Zhang, 2016). The incorporation of core–periphery relations in IR theory also entails the necessity to rethink the development of contemporary modernity. Liberalism, constructivism, and the “classic” English School tend to assume that the modernity should be identified with capitalism, democracy, and international law, developed in the West and later transferred to other regions. On the contrary, several more recent studies invite to describe the development of political and economic modernity as a dialectic 5

The idea that colonialism generated forms of dependency that made the process of economic development more difficult is already present in neo-marxist approaches and in the dependencia theory of the 1970s and 1980s. See A dialogue between IR theory and area studies (Dietz, 1980; Smith, 1981; Wallerstein, 1979).

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process, in which the colonial experience and the interaction with “others” is crucial (Chakrabarty, 2000; Phillips, 2016).

3 Building Bridges Between IR and Area Studies: the Way Forward Tensions and dialectics between International Relations and Area Studies unfold not only in relation to what kind of knowledge is produced, but also how this knowledge is generated, circulated, and transferred. Complementing, challenging, contesting, or emancipating from Western-centric IR, or striking a balance between nomothetic and idiographic approaches (Hollis & Smith, 1990; Jackson, 2016) are matters of not only concepts (Tickner, 2003) but also methodology and methods—that is, how research proceeds to achieve which purpose, and what techniques for gathering and analysing evidence are deployed. These dimensions are all interweaved. Within the canons of mainstream IR, research has been generally driven by the quest for regularities transcending spatio-temporal confines, to be explained across a universe of cases. On the contrary, AS have traditionally valued the mastering of primary sources and the endeavour “to decipher the subjective understanding actors attach to their practices and discourses within their immediate contexts” (Köllner et al., 2018, 4), even against the standard of replicability. Brought to the extremes, this divergence has often translated in the acceptance of each other’s intellectual enterprise with a degree of scepticism. More specifically, Area Studies scholars have been reproached of “horizontal ignorance”, promoting and defending exceptionalisms and descriptivism as well as leaving little room for generalizability beyond the particular case under study to which researchers devote their entire life; reversely, the main limitation of IR allegedly consists of “vertical ignorance”, failing to shed light on “real societies and the conduct of historically situated human agents” (AAS, 1997), conveying a superficial knowledge of cases, relying on weak cultural and language skills, and implicitly or even explicitly using hegemonic worldviews as a yardstick for comparison, whereas ethnographic immersion would ensure thick and context-bound accounts (Köllner et al., 2018). Such mutual circumspection has a rather long history,6 yet it revamped in the wake of the Arab Springs, that provided an occasion for Middle Eastern Studies specialists to demonstrate the failures of theories building on oversimplified notions of the state, sovereignty, nationality, citizenship, legitimacy, anarchy, order, border, and the separation between the domestic and the international realms. En amont of methodological considerations, bridging IR and AS may thus mean finding a middle ground between context-sensitivity and theory-portability. The ambition of embarking on a broad (scholarly and political) project of “provincializing” Western IR may lead to the deconstruction of often orientalized, nativist, 6

Area Studies were originally devoted to the study of “faraway places that needed to be better understood in the world centres of power” (van Schendel 2005, 290 cited in Köllner et al., 2018).

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and essentialized accounts of non-Western societies, accounts which tend to replicate relations of hegemony and domination (binary logics of “us” and “them”, First World–Third World, West–East, North–South, centre and periphery). In that respect, the abovementioned venture of globalizing IR (i.e., recognizing the existence of alternative cosmologies, philosophical and intellectual traditions, theoretical and normative references) moves from a critique of—or at least the dissatisfaction vis-à-vis—the assumption that some Western concepts could be universally acceptable and valid. Let’s take the example of the state and its role in theorizing in IR, which is by definition considered as the field of study of the relationships among states. Far from overlooking the contributions of IR scholars drawing on historiographic or sociological intuitions, or engaging with normative questions, the IR field tends to naturally accept that the international system is, for all times and places, “inhabited” by sovereign states, equipped with borders and central governments. In other words, the ontology of IR starts with the Westphalia Peace and with the statesystem having come into being. Already in 1993 Ruggie acknowledged that some forms of political community (i.e., the state) are expression of Western modernity and reified accordingly by IR mainstream scholarship (Ruggie, 1993). Yet, only within circumscribed strands of literature the relevance of the state has been questioned and unpacked with reference to non-Western contexts, where it may be considered as an artifice of colonialism or the result of a violent imposition. Across a number of cases multiple and hybrid sites of governance where power, authority, territory, and loyalty overlap and co-exist. Similarly, state-to-state interactions may be less significant than transnational or intercommunal relations. However, when the nexus between sovereignty and statehood has been problematized, this was done by scholars from outside the IR disciplinary field (i.e., the idea of “stateless societies”, Fortes and Evans-Pritchard, 1940), or IR scholars with a remarkable engagement with area specialisms (Neumann & Wigen, 2012; Shadian, 2010). On the other hand, not all contexts and case studies lend themselves to a relativization of IR’s alleged statecentrism. Yet even their context-sensitivity may guide us to where to look for the state, from the point of view of territoriality and spatialization, institutional infrastructures as well as the recognition of multiple forms of agency and rationalities (which actors enshrine it and from which logics of action they proceed, for example). In some instances, and at some latitudes, this possibly provides voice opportunities for the weak, excluded, and underrepresented agencies; accordingly, efforts at “decentering” IR aim at adopting “others”’ perspectives including not only nonWestern decision-makers but also viewpoints of those beyond the policy-making elites. The latter dimension is particularly visible in what could be dubbed the “nonWestern IR theories agenda” that indeed bears a Coxian understanding of theory (Acharya & Buzan, 2007, 2019) and premise on the assumption that IR theories are always situated. All in all, both the engagements with non-Western IR and the call for building a Global IR represent possible declensions/articulations of bridging IR and AS, by not only opening up to contributions from the “Third World” or the “Global

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South”7 but also subverting concepts such as “progress”, “modernity”, “development”, “transition”, and the assumption that international socialization equals to a teleological process of westernization. How to translate these conceptual scaffoldings into research practices? Are there methodologies incorporating the programmes of decentring, decolonizing, globalizing provincializing IR? Are there methodological bridges between IR and AS? Two other possible declensions/articulations of bridging IR and AS may rescue us from that slippery slope. The first one, the “Comparative Area Studies agenda”, tends to envision multisited fieldwork research and site-intensive techniques of inquiry, aimed at the “exposure to local complexities on the ground, to intellectual traditions of native scholarship, and to ongoing debates within relevant area studies communities” (Köllner et al., 2018, 15). Within that approach, area specialism is extrapolated to recognize the relevance of contextual attributes outside of one’s primary area of expertise; while the comparative would bring the researchers to uncover cross-case and cross-regions commonalities or to theoretically refine differences between conventional areas by means of translation. On the one hand, travelling theories and their inter-area itineraries (Said, 1983) may dangerously result in instances of conceptual overstretch; on the other, they may overcome the main sources of suspicions between disciplinary scholars and area specialists: theoretical “parochialism” (that is, the same phenomenon being discussed in different regional settings, using different terminology); the geographic confinement of academic communities (rarely liaising each other on a “South-South” basis and therefore replicating a post-colonial dimension of knowledge production and dissemination); theorizing about the world from the veranda (Eckl, 2008). The second one involved the study of international and regional organizations beyond their institutional shape, performance, and policy outputs, paving the way to a political sociology approach. Inspired, among others, by the so-called “practice turn” in IR, this approach entails ethnographic endeavours, bottom-up and grounded perspectives, micro-level analyses, attention to agency and informality in organizational contexts as well as to power configurations across different contexts. Far from romanticizing fieldwork activities and making “the local” a fetish, a bottom-up approach may reconstruct the study of areas that are not so inaccessible and remote, by calling into question EU-centric approaches to the European Union itself. Studying EU’s encounters with local actors and domestic contexts may entail “leaving the armchair and exploring the EU from the point of view of the people actually producing it” (Adler-Nissen, 2016, 87–88), both within the EU and beyond it. After all, shedding light on interlocutors’ perceptions of the EU and Europe at the empirical level may be a necessary step towards “decentering”/ “provincializing” Europe (Onar & Nicolaïdis, 2013), and indirectly, EU-centric IR through Area Studies’ toolkits and sensitivities (De Franco’s chapter). 7 Bilgin (2016) in that respect clarifies that the task is “not additive but reconstructive” and that “what is being sought is not telling ‘multiple stories’, but ‘excavating’ […] multiple layers to already existing stories with an eye on power/knowledge dynamics” (138).

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Overall, this edited volume contributes to the effort of building bridges between IR and AS and as well as the attempt to “globalize” IR in several ways. First, the volume shows how regions considered as marginal as Africa, Latin America, East and South East Asia constitute rich and differentiated analytical spaces, able to offer significant contributions to the advancement of IR discipline. The volume also discusses the potentials and the possible limits of the effort of “provincializing IR”. While on the one hand they can help overcoming Eurocentric bias, on the other hand they might reinforce new exceptionalist visions of international politics. Furthermore, the volume reflects on the necessity of establishing positive interaction between what is traditionally considered as local-based knowledge (political culture, norms, historical legacies) to the global perspective generally embraced by IR theory. In this context, the volume underlines the important contribution of comparative regionalism that enables to consider both long term structural material and ideational factors, and local specificities, while allowing to “de-exoticise” and “de-orientalise” the deep-seated meaning of AS itself. Finally, several contributions, including Paolo Rosa’s chapter on quantitative approaches to the debate, highlight how the construction of disciplinary divides between IR and AS—based on the binary separation between the alleged theoretical universality and the empirical and particular—has led to the creation of hierarchies in the academic epistemic community and has limited the possibility of cross fertilization. Ultimately, this volume hopes to offer a meaningful contribution to the efforts to overcome the divide between IR and AS, as well as, to the attempts to promote theories and methods that reflect the necessity to understand and theorize an increasingly diverse, plural, and changing world.

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Global and Post-western IR, Area Studies, and the Rise of China: Promises and Limits Matteo Dian

Abstract East Asia is increasingly at the centre of debates among IR scholars. China’s political, economic, and military ascendency is increasingly considered as a crucial test case for main approaches to IR. Despite this renewed attention, mainstream theories employed to analyse contemporary Asia are still remarkably Eurocentric. A wave of studies has argued in favour of a broad “decolonization” of theoretical concepts used to analyse East Asia as well as other regions. These efforts have produced several distinct research agendas. Firstly, critical and post-colonial theorists have worked on the par destruens, highlighting the inherent Eurocentrism of many IR concepts and theories. Secondly, scholars as Buzan and Acharya have promoted the idea of Global IR, seeking to advance a “non-Western” and non Eurocentric research agenda. This agenda has found fertile ground especially in China, where several scholars have tried to promote a Chinese school of IR. This chapter has three main purposes. Firstly, it briefly explores the issue of Eurocentrism in IR studies dedicated to East Asia. Secondly, it maps the theoretical debates aimed at overcoming it, looking in particular at the “Global IR” research programme and the so-called Chinese School. Finally, it sketches a few other possible avenues of research for a very much needed cooperation between Global IR and area studies. Keywords Eurocentrism · Global IR · Chinese School of IR · Non-western IR theory · Area studies · Rise of China

The following chapter was partially published in the Special Issue of the Italian Political Science Review titled ‘Reaching for allies? The dialectics and overlaps between International Relations and Area Studies in the study of politics, security and conflicts’), with the title ‘The rise of China between Global IR and area studies: an agenda for cooperation’, https://www.cambridge.org/core/ journals/italian-political-science-review-rivista-italiana-di-scienza-politica/article/rise-of-chinabetween-global-ir-and-area-studies-an-agenda-for-cooperation/B6A319ECD1FE8CD46F33E1FD 34B91DA2. M. Dian (B) Department of Political and Social Sciences, Università di Bologna, Strada Maggiore 45, 40125 Bologna (BO), Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. D’Amato et al. (eds.), International Relations and Area Studies, Contributions to International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39655-7_2

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1 Introduction During the last decade, the rise of China and the global power shift towards East Asia have become central focus for IR scholarship (Cox, 2012; Vezirgiannidou, 2013). The rise of China in particular has been considered as a new battleground for different approaches to International Relations. Other key developments in the region have entered the forefront of the theoretical discussion in the discipline. Examples are developments of different forms of economic and political regionalism, evolution of the alliance relations, forms of cooperation in the field of non-traditional security, just to mention a few. This chapter, coherently with the other contributions in this volume, aims at promoting a critical reflection on how IR theory as a discipline approaches these topics, and how, while doing it, engages with area studies and cognate disciplines. More specifically, this chapter has three main purposes. Firstly, it explores the issue of Eurocentrism in IR studies dedicated to East Asia. Secondly, it maps the theoretical debates aimed at overcoming it, looking in particular at the “Global IR” research programme and the so-called Chinese School. Doing so, the chapter aims at contributing to the debate promoted by this volume on how to bridge the divide between International Relations and Area Studies. In particular, this chapter aims at demonstrating that the emergence and the development of post-Western theoretical approaches represents a valuable opportunity to overcome several blind spots characterizing positivist and mainstream approaches to IR, especially when it comes to the study of East Asia. The chapter also highlights several limits of these approaches might entail. The most evident appears to be a tendency to essentialism and a limited capacity of theories and approaches to explain different cases. The Chinese school in particular tends to “speak for power”, producing concepts and analyses that can be considered functional to legitimate the political narrative promoted by the Chinese government. In this sense, the Chinese school is affected by some of the same problems post-colonial and theorists identify in mainstream theories. Finally, the chapter sketches a few other possible avenues of research for a very much needed cooperation between Global IR and area studies. More specifically, the chapter stresses the need to broaden the conceptual and historical horizons of IR theory, including cases and samples associated to a wider geographical and historical spectrum. This is not only functional to the possibility of collecting new data. It is necessary to reconsider the conceptual and theoretical limits of certain categories that are deemed as universal and natural, such as state, sovereignty, anarchy, market, or international order. On the one hand, this process would be useful for the discipline to grow out of some of its Euro-centric bias and its limited engagement with non-Western regions. On the other hand, it would represent an alternative to current assumptions associated to the critical and post-Western theories as the emphasis on deconstruction and the promotion of “national approaches”. The latter often leads to assume that the behaviour of each country is exceptional and incommensurable and can be understood only referring to local conditions and local concepts, foreclosing possibilities for comparison as well as theoretical and analytical progresses.

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2 The Rise of China and Eurocentrism in IR Despite the renewed attention to the case of the rise of China, mainstream theories employed to analyse contemporary Asia are still remarkably Euro-centric. A notable example is the Graham Allison’s book Destined for War, in which, the author compares ancient Athens and Sparta and other sixteen cases of power transition, in order to advance a hypothesis on the future of US–China relations. Most of the selected cases regard modern or contemporary Europe, or the United States and the USSR (Allison, 2017). As Kang has pointed out, from Allison’s perspective, “nothing that happened in Asia over the past 2,500 years, or elsewhere in the world, for that matter, that is important enough to study” (Kang, 2017). Kang’s criticism points to an obvious weakness of IR theory: the majority of mainstream approaches have been derived by and tested on European or TransAtlantic history. Then it has been simply assumed that those theories are characterized by what Robert Gilpin called “timeless wisdom” and applied, and often mis-applied, to other regional contexts (Gilpin, 1984). History of other regions, or the study of the comparative evolution of non-Western international systems, have been rarely used by IR scholars to produce and test their theories (Acharya, 2004; Kang, 2003; Kang & Lin, 2019). A complete and exhaustive discussion of the Euro-centric bias in contemporary and classic IR is surely beyond the space and the scope of this chapter. However, it is significant to mention a few of the crucial concepts that at a close scrutiny immediately reveal their Euro-centric bias (Hobson, 2012). The first is the “myth of Westphalia” (Osiander, 2001). The peace of Westphalia is generally considered a benchmark date for the foundation of the contemporary sovereign state as well for the contemporary international system or international society. Realists have generally assumed that every state in every historical configuration behaves “like units”, in an equalitarian system, without functional differentiation, while maximizing their security or power (Waltz, 1979). The centrality of the Westphalian peace as a foundational benchmark for IR has been alimented also by constructivists. According to Wendt, the Peace of Westphalia represented one of the very few crucial passages between Hobbesian and Lockean type of anarchy and the development of some forms of mutual recognition between states (Wendt, 1999). Non-European or non-Western international systems do not appear in Wendt’s framework, or at least implicitly they are supposed to conform to this trajectory. The “classic” English School, traditionally keener to historical research, has studied the interaction between the West and the rest theorizing the expansion of the European International Society, explaining how other regions of the world absorbed the primary institutions of the Westphalian European society of states (Bull & Watson, 1984). The contemporary English School has significantly reconsidered the theory of the expansion of the international society, amending it from its Euro-centric features and including a much more balanced and nuanced account of the often

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brutal encounter between West and East in the colonials era (Buzan & Lawson, 2015; Suzuki, 2009). The Westphalian myth leads to several problems for the discipline: it distorts our understanding of the emergence of the modern international system; it leads to misinterpretation of major aspects of contemporary international relations; it prevents from theorizing cross-regional interactions; and it thwarts the accommodation of pluralism in an increasingly globalized world (Kayaoglu, 2010). Another significant issue is the lack of agency for the non-Western world. When non-Western states and people are included in theoretical accounts, they tend to be passive and “without agency”: depending on the perspective in which they were socialized, included, “civilized”, absorbed, or colonized. They did not act in the process. They simply appeared in the picture and, consequently in the discipline’s theoretical accounts, when they started to interact, often in a very asymmetric way, with Western powers. As underlined by Evelyn Goh, American IR, with its preference for positivism has contributed to this bias. On the one hand, the preference for positivist approaches and the search for “covering laws” has promoted a “hyper-westernized framework of cognitive biases and normative assumptions”, regarding states’ behaviour, stability of the system, balance of power, the nature of the international order, as well as epistemological assumptions the alleged neutrality of the knowledge produced by IR scholars (Goh, 2019). Ultimately what appears clear is that different approaches in the discipline and in particular structural realism, but also “mainstream” constructivism have approached Asia with theoretical instruments, concepts, and research agendas largely drawn from the European or at best Trans-Atlantic history and with a methodological and epistemological approach strongly shaped by the American hegemony in political science and IR. The next section of the paper will engage with criticism offered to this problem and possible solutions offered by critical IR, and promoters of the “global IR” or “Non-Western IR” schools.

3 Post-colonial, Non-western, and Global IR A wave of studies has argued in favour of a broad “decolonization” of theoretical concepts used to analyse East Asia. This effort has produced several distinct research agendas. Firstly, critical and post-colonial theorists have worked on the par destruens, highlighting the inherent Eurocentrism of many IR concepts and theories. Secondly, authors such as Buzan and Acharya have promoted the idea of Global IR, seeking to advance a “non-Western” research agenda. This agenda has found fertile ground especially in China, where several scholars have tried to promote a Chinese school of IR. Critical and post-colonial theorists have been at the forefront of the effort to criticize the Euro-centric bias of many theoretical assumptions and approaches (Hobson,

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2012; Hobson & Sajed, 2017). On the one hand, critical theories have pointed out how mainstream approaches cannot be considered as neutral but should rather be considered as expression of the perspective of their authors and the social, economic, and political forces in which they live and write. In other words, against positivism, no social theory can express a neutral point of view, but rather a biased, contingent, and socially and politically located perspective, informed by the hegemonic forces shaping a given system (Tickner, 2003). From this point of view, possibly with a bit of exaggeration, much of mainstream IR appears to be an expression of US and Western material and ideological hegemony, rather than the result of neutral and unbiased scholarship aiming a discovering the inner workings of international politics (Cox, 1983, 1987). Therefore, theories such as the hegemonic stability theory (or its liberal variants, à la Ikenberry) for instance would be considered as a form of legitimation for the US hegemony (Seth, 2009). Moreover, critical theory aims at denouncing the “technical reason” dominant in mainstream IR and its conservative bias, trying to avoid, in the words of Kimberly Hutchins, “reproduce the patterns of hegemonic power of the present” (Hutchings, 2007). The main take-aways of this approach and this criticism, applied to the issue of East Asian IR regard the necessity to understand the role of hegemonic intellectual forces in the development of IR as a discipline, the possibility of a multiplicity of empirical and theoretical points of view, the relative nature of many epistemological assumptions, as well as the need to consider social action as contingency and socially constructed. Post-colonial theorists have built on these assumptions putting forward several key arguments: 1. The notion of “neo-colonialism”, namely the idea that post-colonial states have developed different forms of dependence from the West or, more specifically, their former colonial powers that can vary from psychological, social, technological, and economic (Persaud & Sajed, 2018; Sajed, 2013; Tickner, 2013). 2. The rejection of the idea that modernity has been developed in Europe to be exported in other areas of the world, to be replaced by the concept that modernity has developed through the interaction between the West and the colonial world, through forms of global interaction (Buzan & Lawson, 2015; Chakrabarty, 2000). In this sense the post-colonial approach seeks, as Sanjay Seth put it, to “provincialize Europe”, in three different ways. Firstly, it challenges the centrality accorded to Europe as the historical source and origin of the international order; secondly it questions the universality accorded to moral and legal perspectives which reflect and reproduce the power relations characteristic of the colonial encounter; finally it underlines the constitutive role of knowledge in IR, reminding how concepts and representations shape political categories and practices (Seth, 2011). 3. The renewed significance given to interaction between core and periphery in the development of modernity (Buzan & Lawson, 2015). From this point of view, the core–periphery relationship is a crucial constituent of the contemporary international system as much as anarchy and distribution of power. In particular,

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the development of technology, the industrial revolution, and the rise of capitalist modernity have turned separate regional orders into a global international order that encompassed elements of parity among states as well as elements of hierarchy between the core and the periphery of the system. In this sense in the words of Persaud and Sajed, “The Third World has been a maker of the international system as much as it has been made by it” (Persaud & Sajed, 2018). 4. The fact that the patterns of inclusion/exclusion, subordination, socialization, and adaptation have decisively shaped the course of the political development of key non-European States such as Turkey, Japan, and Russia (Zarakol, 2010). The hierarchical and racialized nature of the international order developed between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, determined by the expansion of the European international society has fundamentally influenced the interaction between the West and the key non-Western powers. This element is crucial both to understand those states’ choices in the past and their legacy, but also how non-Western powers perceive the contemporary international order and their role within it. 5. The rejection of the idea that IR should be, following Waltz, about “few important things” and about “great powers”. On the contrary, post-colonial theorists highlight the necessity to look at the role of “subjects and powerless” and their perspective, in order to provide an account of the role and the perceptions of actors that are different from great powers and economic and political elites. This, in turn, entails both a criticism of mainstream approaches as well as a different angle of observation to the objects of the scholarly analysis. This argument implies the recognition of multiple forms of normative agency associated to non-Western states and non-hegemonic ideas and norms (Acharya, 2014). These arguments and these assumptions contributed to the approach labelled “Global IR” or “non-Western IR” promoted mainly by Barry Buzan and Amitav Acharya (Acharya & Buzan, 2007, 2019). This project aimed at searching for new intellectual resources that could originate in non-Western theories of IR. This project built on the necessity to overcome Eurocentrism in IR and welcoming the idea that theories are not neutral but are conditioned by the context in which they have been elaborated, while they refrain from considering IR theories as expression of intellectual hegemony. As Acharya has argued, “the main theories of IR are too deeply rooted in, and beholden to, the history, intellectual traditions, and agency claims of the West, to accord little more than a marginal place to those of the non-Western world” (Acharya, 2016, 8). Therefore, they argue that the discipline needs to develop a more plural approach built on different regional and national schools.

4 The Chinese School and Its Limits Chinese scholars, within the country as well as outside, are those who took the idea of non-Western theory and “national” theories of IR more seriously. The Chinese School of IR have emerged in the 2000s with the works of IR theorists such as Qin

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Yaqing (2007) and Yan Xuetong (2011, 2019), and the philosopher Zhao Tingyang (2006, 2009). The Chinese school has received a significant attention also outside the Chinese academia, generating a debate that has involved among others scholars such as Barry Buzan, William Callahan, and Astrid Nordin (Callahan, 2008; Nordin, 2016; Wang & Buzan, 2014). The key insight of the first three was the idea of re-founding the main concepts and approaches to IR departing from ancient Chinese thinking, as Confucius, Laozi, and Mencius, as well as Daoist philosophy. Within the Chinese School it is possible to identify two distinct contributions. The first looks at Confucian concepts such as harmony and hierarchy, associated with Yan Xuetong and Zhao Tingyang’s contributions, and the idea of relationality, promoted mainly by Qin Yaqing. The concept of harmony (hexie) refers to the possibility and the necessity of finding an agreement between different positions and different values, without resorting to conflict and violence. The condition of harmony does not entail homogeneity, but the possibility of coexistence between differences. The Confucian tradition also contributes to a substantial re-evaluation and reconsideration of the political order generated by the Chinese Empire. As Yan Xuetong has argued, historically the Chinese world order was based on “humane authority” (wang), rather than on hegemony (ba). As he stated: “The root difference between humane authority and hegemonic authority is that the former relies on morality and the latter on material power to uphold interstate order” (Yan, 2011). The stability of the Imperial system, as a consequence, is interpreted to be a function of morality and constraints on power, rather than on pure economic and military might. The other key idea in the reinterpretation of Chinese is the concept of Tianxia (all under heaven). Both classic and more recent literature in the fields of Chinese history and International Relations theory have discussed extensively whether and how the idea of Tianxia, and the Sino-centric world order, represented an accurate representation of the reality of Asia before the age of imperialism, or if those concepts reflected an ideological construction to legitimize the Chinese imperial power, or even if they were simply a historical myth (Fairbank & Chen, 1968; Zhang & Buzan, 2012). The most influential contemporary reinterpretation of the Tianxia system has been proposed by the philosopher Zhao Tingyang. In this interpretation the “Middle Kingdom” was a benevolent empire that provided stability and prosperity through morality and moderation. This system was destroyed by Western imperialism in the nineteenth century (Callahan, 2015; Zhao, 2006). Before the rise of Western imperialism China was able to underpin a peaceful, stable, and just international order. The idea of tianxia and Sinocentic order in the Chinese debate reflects the growing awareness of and pride in the country’s ancient civilization and its contribution to the world. These concepts, however, also contribute to the construction of a new form of Chinese exceptionalism (Zhang, 2013). The Tianxia system is presented as an alternative to the Westphalian world, built on

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formal equality and power politics. In contrast, the Sino-centric model was rooted in Chinese superiority by virtue and morality (Dian, 2017). This narrative creates a key moral distinction between China and the West. While the first is depicted as inherently moral and able to generate stability and harmony the latter is portrayed as decaying, individualist, and immoral. Consequently, the Westphalian system, but also by extension the current rules-based order, should be transcended (Breslin, 2021; Callahan, 2008; Zhang, 2012). The other contribution of the China school is related to the work of Qin Yaqing and in particular to his emphasis on relationality. Qin describes two different approaches to global governance: a rules-based approach and a relational approach and uses Europe and East Asia as case studies. According to Qin, both forms of governance exist in the contemporary international society, but the former is far more present given Western intellectual and political hegemony. Rules-based governance is considered shaped by the American and European tradition and post war experience, and reflects Western individualism. Therefore, rational states are then able to interact with one another according to the various rules, institutions, and regimes that govern those relations. A relational approach, on the other hand, operates on the basis of mutual trust. This approach highlights the necessity of negotiation rather than control and predictability (Qin, 2010, 2018). Qin’s logic of relationality is rooted in the Daoist zhongyong dialectics. It stresses the role of conciliation of the opposites and complementarity over confrontation and differences. From this perspective relations between powers, rather than being shaped by systemic constraints are defined by processes and interaction that can lead to complementary interaction and inclusive coexistence (Qin, 2018). Overall, it can be argued that the Chinese School tends to essentialize identities, historical legacies, and cultural traits, to explain foreign policy behaviours or specific orientations in international affairs. This approach offers a substantially essentialist reading of Chinese foreign policy, stressing the causal effect of the Chinese Confucian culture (Hwang, 2021). Another, and maybe even more fundamental, problem is the risk of “talking for power”. In doing so they contribute to creating or to legitimizing a political discourse proposed by the national government or by the national elite. In other terms, international relations theorists, especially when they conceptualize the role of a country as exceptional, can, voluntarily or not, justify policy choices of a government. This undermines the effort to produce knowledge aimed at understanding the world. In this way the Chinese School might be affected by the same limits many critical and post structuralist scholars identify in “mainstream” theories such as contemporary liberalism or the hegemonic stability theory. From this perspective, if the latter can be interpreted as intellectual superstructure of the US hegemonic role, the Chinese School could be considered functional to justify Beijing’s power and role in the world. In the case of the Chinese school is hard to separate concepts that can be considered as analytically useful and concepts that should be considered as functional to feed the narrative the government itself is trying to build. This is the case of concepts such as peaceful rise, peaceful development, new type of great power relations, Community

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of Common Destiny, and Chinese Dream (Dian, 2017; Rolland, 2020; Williams, 2021). Finally, so far the concepts and the theories promoted by the Chinese School seem to have problems to explain other cases, different from the Chinese case. This is surely a major shortcoming, even for the perspective of those than can be sympathetic with critical approaches to IR. As Acharya has highlighted building generalizable concepts and theories represent the next necessary step for the Chinese School as well as for other theories associated with “Global IR” (Acharya, 2016).

5 Current Challenges Cooperation between IR theory in general, and specifically Global IR, and area studies is necessary, and potentially very fruitful for both disciplines. Here I will mention a few empirical and theoretical issues that would particularly benefit from it and would contribute to the research agenda of Global IR. This would help expand the theoretical horizon of the discipline, while providing better instruments to analyse real-world political choices. 1. The necessity to expand the historical and geographical horizon of “samples” and “cases”. This need regards both quantitative and qualitative approaches. A non Euro-centric discipline should be able to incorporate cases from other regions of the world as well as other periods than the nineteenth and twentieth centuries before claiming the “universal validity” of their claims (Johnston, 2012). This expansion of the empirical and historical horizon would not just constitute the discovery of new repository of data, against which “testing” main theories and concepts. On the contrary, it would constitute an occasion to rethink the alleged “universal validity” of assumptions and concepts that have mainstream IR, such as anarchy, sovereign equality, the relationship between states and markets, and balance of power. 2. Overcoming the idea of the Weberian-Westphalian state as the only unit of any given international system. The idea that the system is necessarily composed by an ordinating principle (anarchy) and its unites (national states) is one of the most enduring legacies of the Waltzian approach to IR. This fundamentally inhibits a sound and historically aware analysis of areas and periods in which the Weberian state was not present or fully developed or interacted with other forms of statehood and political structures. An example of the latter are recent works on British and European encounters with pre-colonial Asia, based on contacts between Western non-state agents such as the East India Company and local authorities (Phillips & Sharman, 2015). These insights are functional in several possible progresses both for IR theory and for the dialogue with area studies and global history. Firstly, admitting the significance of non-state actors, social and political networks, and hybrid forms of political organizations different from the modern state in the encounter between Europe and the non-European world,

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especially in the colonial era, opens up to a significant convergence with the main purpose of contemporary global history, interested in uncovering and describing the web of social and cultural regional and global networks (Berg, 2013; Perez Garcia & De Sousa, 2018). This helps revising the theoretical accounts of what the English School defines as the “expansion of the international society”, namely the process that has led non-Western states to adopt the main features of the Western and European international order and the Westphalian state (Bull & Watson, 1984). These emerging accounts underline that heterogeneity rather than homogeneity in terms of forms of political organizations, especially in Asia in the pre-colonial and the colonial era (Phillips, 2016). This element in turn helps providing a more sophisticate picture of the ascendency of the West in the nineteenth century and its legacies for the contemporary “rise of the East” (Buzan & Lawson, 2015). 3. The coexistence of hierarchy and anarchy. As scholars contest the theoretical necessity of the modern nation as main actor of the international system, the debate has moved on to contest the second main assumption of the Waltzian theoretical scheme, the issue of anarchy and sovereignty equality. This has generated a number of different debates. For instance, the new hierarchy studies have investigated the possibility of considering hierarchy as an alternative organizing principle for the international order and how hierarchy affects agents’ behaviour (MacDonald & Lake, 2008; Mattern & Zarakol, 2016). Another important debate refers to the so-called “third wave of hegemonic studies” (Ikenberry & Nexon, 2019). This research programme, trying to find a synthesis between theories on hegemony, power transition, and international order, opens new avenues of research to investigate patterns of contestation, socialization, and resistance both at the global and regional level. This insight is particularly important to understand the rise of China as well as the broader process of renegotiation of the regional order in East Asia. On the one hand, the Chinese ascendency has generated a direct contestation of pre-existing hierarchies of power, status, and prestige, as well as consolidated norms. This process has in turn led to responses by other regional states, and by the United States, that have sought to reaffirm and consolidate the main normative pillars of the regional order (Dian & Meijer, 2020; Foot, 2020; Goh, 2019). On the other hand, Beijing’s new centrality in the region has generated new forms of hierarchies, especially in the economic sector (Liu & Liu, 2019). The effects of the presence and the possible evolution of this dual hierarchy on the stability of the order, on the compliance with key norms and principles as well as on the strategies of large and middle powers in the region is likely to be central for IR scholars and area specialists alike (Loke, 2021). 1.4. Investigating other pathways to modernity. IR as a discipline is remarkably anchored to several very linear stories of progress and modernity. The first is the liberal version that links the rise of capitalism and democracy within fully formed nation states and describes it as the main “cause” of peace. The second is the classification promoted by Alexander Wendt of the possible progress from Hobbesian, Lockean, and Kantian anarchies (Wendt, 1999). The third is

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the “expansion story” promoted by the classic English School that assumes that European states developed the main primary institutions of the international society and later on they socialized the entire world to its main rules and norms (Bull & Watson, 1984). This narrative has been integrated by the solidarist version of the English school that sees the possibility and the necessity of a further development of an international society based on primary institutions rooted on the centrality of the individual and the possibility to transcend the Westphalian features of the international society. As in the classic “expansion” story, the process of socialization tends to go from the “Western Core” to the “Non-Western periphery”. These narratives at once tend to deprive non-Western actors of agency and negate the possibility of a multiplicity of pathways to modernity, limiting both the efforts to theorize how different states and regions came to term with political, social, and economic modernity and the historical account of these processes. Moreover, in many non-Western states, the development of the nation state, the development of a capitalist economy, and the process of liberalization and inclusion of the political system did not happen in the same sequence as in Europe and the United States. The historical investigation and the theorization of the processes of the led nonWestern states is crucial to understand their past and present role in the international system as well as their relationship with the current rules and norms of the international system. Examples are, for instance, the works of Shogo Suzuki on China’s and Japan’s entry in the international society during the late nineteenth century that underlines the brutality of the impact with the West, that deeply differs from the rather benevolent portray of the classic English School (Suzuki, 2009). Another path-breaking work from this point of view is Ayse Zarakol’s investigation on Turkey, Japan, Russia and the role of stigma against the outsiders of the international order (Zarakol, 2010). It is important to underline that the contemporary debate on these issues has moved beyond the pure “critique” of the mainstream approaches and it has tried to promote a nuanced understanding of the processes that have characterized nonWestern states and regions pathways to modernity. To do so, many works in this field have located themselves in a middle ground between critical and mainstream approaches. In particular, while they maintain the necessity to investigate different points of view and perspectives on social and political processes, they keep open the necessity to build theoretical frameworks able to elucidate different cases in different regions. This perspective is increasingly relevant for the study of contemporary international politics in East Asia. In particular, it is important to understand how different regional and national pathways to modernity shape the current perception of the international order as well as other actors. Each pathway to modernity is crucial to understand how great powers might attempt to reform or contest the regional order. This element is central to understand China’s vision of the current regional order and its main normative foundations, such as sovereignty and non-interference (Dian, 2017; Rolland, 2020).

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2.5. States and markets. As Karl Polanyi argued back in 1944, markets do not appear spontaneously when the state retreats, but they are rather embedded in a social, political, and historical context (Polanyi, 1944). As a consequence, understanding the origin and the development of market institutions in nonWestern regions is crucial to understand both the development of economic regionalism and regional economic orders and the approach of non-Western nations to global economic governance. For instance, the Japanese and South Korean approaches to global and regional economic governance are inextricably linked to the rise (and fall) of the developmental state and the dialectic between Western influence, adaptation of foreign models to local interests (Johnson, 1995; Woo-Cumings, 1999). Something similar can be argued for the Chinese case. The study of China’s economic history, as well as the analysis of development of the current “state capitalist” model and the mutual influence it has had on China’s political system are crucial to understand how Beijing approaches the global and regional economic order (McNally, 2012; Naughton & Tsai, 2015). Yet, relatively few studies have explicitly tried to assess how the consolidation of the state capitalist model, together with the expansion of the Chinese economic presence and influence in Asia and globally has impact on the normative and institutional foundations of the international economic order (Breslin, 2021; Dian & Menegazzi, 2018). Nevertheless, this aspect can be considered central for the study of the renegotiation of the international order generated by the rise of China. 3.6. Globalization and localization of norms. Another key area of research is represented by the relationship between diffusion of global norms and localization of norms at the regional level. As Amitav Acharya has highlighted in the “global South” states tend to attach different value and interpret global norms differently, especially those generated by the West. Process of socialization to global norms, and their possible adaptation to local needs and ideas, are strongly influenced by the “cognitive prior” of any given region or state. Moreover, states often create and consolidate their own rules in order to resist external influence or dominance from great powers (Acharya, 2011). The investigation of the interaction between global and local norms is still at its infancy, despite the fact that several very valuable works have been already published on the topic (Bellamy & Beeson, 2010; Stubbs, 2008). Both constructivist approaches and the contemporary English School appear to be particularly equipped for this task, and particularly for the investigation of the global/local interaction, among others, in the fields of diplomacy, human rights protection, the development of markets and capitalism, and diplomatic practices. This dynamic is crucial for the analysis and the theorization of current processes of contestation of the international order, both at the regional and at the global level. Rising powers in Asia have ceased to be “norms takers” and have started to promote forms of regional and global governance informed by their own ideas, norms, models of developments, and interests (Foot, 2020). Chinese initiatives as

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the Asia Infrastructure and Investment Bank (AIIB) and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) are just a few examples (Dian & Menegazzi, 2018). Understanding both the patterns of resistance to global norms, often associated to liberal and Western ideas and practices, as well as the possibility of regionalization and globalization of nonWestern norms represent therefore a key field of enquiry for scholars working at the intersection of IR and AS. 4.7. Avoiding essentialism. Many IR theorists have tended to essentialize Asian traits and attribute an excessive causal weight on cultural and identity related variables. An example is the debate on the role of Confucianism as a “pacifist attitude” and the debate on Confucian peace (Kang, 2010; Kelly, 2012; Phillips, 2018). On the one hand, it is entirely legitimate to argue that Confucian values and the social structure informed and shaped by those values have played a significant role in East Asian international politics both historically and today. On the other hand, attributing the peacefulness of the Sino-centric order entirely on its Confucian characteristics is probably as accurate as attributing the bellicosity of the early Modern Europe to the Christian features of the European culture. The essentialization of the Confucian identity is particularly significant in the writings of the Chinese school that tends to portray the PRC as inherently pacifist, reformist, and inclusive, as opposed to a West willing to impose its own interests and values, also through conflict (Hwang, 2021; Zhang, 2013). This process tends to further strengthen the tendency to speak for power, reproducing the same dynamic that many critical and post-colonial theorists denounce in mainstream theories of IR, from the contemporary liberalism to the hegemonic stability theory. More attention and dialogue with area scholars and historians of modern and premodern Asia would probably help reconsidering the vision of an essentialized China as an ideological construction rather than an accurate historical description that can function as a foundation for a new theoretical approach (Wang, 2010).1

6 Conclusion This chapter has suggested how cooperation between IR theory and area studies has been and is likely to continue to be, very fruitful as well as necessary for both disciplines. As East Asia and other non-Western regions gain an increasingly central position in international politics as well as in scholarly discussions, International Relations theory needs to broaden its horizons, both in theoretical and in empirical terms. On the one hand, IR scholars need to recognize that many of the concepts and assumptions on which the discipline have been built upon do not necessarily fit 1

IR theorists that have seriously engaged history of pre-modern China tend to underline the recurrence of conflict both within China and between the Chinese Empire and other political units. An example is Hui 2005.

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an increasingly plural, globalized, and interconnected world. This does not mean to radically rejecting the main progresses the discipline has done in the last decades. It rather means considering as relative concepts and assumptions what we previously considered endowed of “timeless wisdom”, and universal validity. It also means seeking to expand the “sample” of cases, geographically and historically, against which theories are “tested”. Overall, testing new limits of theories and concepts does not mean rejecting them altogether, it rather means gaining a better understanding of their validity as heuristic devices. Therefore, concepts such as sovereignty, balance of power, hegemony, and statehood can find different applications in different contexts. They can be extremely useful for most concepts to analyse some regional and international order, while they can be less useful for others. While critical and post-colonial studies have played an important part in the effort of “globalizing” the discipline, opening to new voices and perspectives, their effort has largely concentrated on the pars denstruens related to the critique of colonialism, racism, and other forms of exploitation. While those are, and remain, legitimate arguments, it is also important to build new theoretical frameworks, or to improve the existing ones, making sure that they are able to provide new insights on international politics of the present and of the past, in various world regions. Very often critical and post-colonial theorists have rejected the concept of generalizability altogether, limiting the possibility of a fruitful debate both with mainstream theories and with area studies. The final consideration of this paper is related to the idea of building “national schools” of IR, such as the Chinese School. While the idea of integrating insights from other intellectual traditions is fascinating and entirely legitimate, the actual research project has tended to produce new exceptionalist visions of international politics, or even to offer a new intellectual loudspeaker for power, legitimizing a state’s narrative and its foreign policy strategy. This tendency can also be associated with a sort of “positive orientalism” by which scholars tend to emphasize the uniqueness of ideas and practices promoted by non-Western and often non-democratic regimes. For instance, concepts such as win– win, new type of great power relations, respect for the principle of non-interference, communitarian spirit, primacy of the community over the individual can be romanticized as “uniquely Chinese concepts” or also be understood as elements of a narrative aimed at consolidating non-democratic and authoritarian norms and practices.

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Africa in the Study of International Relations: The (Double) Realist Bias of Global IR Luca Raineri and Edoardo Baldaro

Abstract The Global IR research agenda lays emphasis on the marginalised, nonWestern forms of power and knowledge that underpin today’s international system. Focusing on Africa, this chapter questions two fundamental assumptions of this approach, arguing that they err by excess of realism—in two different ways. First, the claim that Africa is marginal to IR thinking holds true only as long as one makes the whole of IR discipline coincide with the Realist school. Second, the Global IR commitment to better appreciate “non-Western” contributions is ontologically realist, because it fails to recognise that the West and the non-West are dialectically constitutive of one another. To demonstrate this, the chapter first shows that Africa has moved from the periphery to the core of IR scholarship: in the post-paradigmatic phase, Africa is no longer a mere provider of deviant cases, but a laboratory for theory-building of general validity. In the second part, the Sahel provides a case for unsettling reified conceptions of Africa’s conceptual and geographical boundaries through the dialectical articulation of the inside/outside dichotomy. Questioning the “place” of Africa in IR—both as identity and function—thus paves the way to a “less realist” approach to Global IR.

The following chapter was partially published in the Special Issue of the Italian Political Science Review titled ‘Reaching for allies? The dialectics and overlaps between International Relations and Area Studies in the study of politics, security and conflicts’), with the title ‘The place of Africa in international relations: the centrality of the margins in Global IR’, https://www.cambri dge.org/core/journals/italian-political-science-review-rivista-italiana-di-scienza-politica/article/ abs/place-of-africa-in-international-relations-the-centrality-of-the-margins-in-global-ir/5B1F6E 3DF0D65AB38A93CE30CFF2811D. L. Raineri (B) Researcher at DIRPOLIS Institute, Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa, Italy e-mail: [email protected] E. Baldaro Researcher at REPI Institute, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. D’Amato et al. (eds.), International Relations and Area Studies, Contributions to International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39655-7_3

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1 Introduction: A “Double-Realist” Bias? What is the place of Africa in international relations (IR)? In recent decades, Africa specialists and IR theorists have frequently deplored the alleged marginalisation of Africa in IR literature (see for instance Dunn & Shaw, 2001; Brown, 2012). It is claimed that African dynamics are insufficiently explored and poorly conceptualised in the study of international politics. At the same time, under-resourced African scholars, universities, and journals struggle to obtain visibility in a research environment that is both highly competitive and self-referential (Hoffman, 1977). Similar observations are not unique to Africa, and could be stretched to other regions beyond “the West” (albeit, perhaps, to a lesser degree). Noting this, the proponents of Global IR (Acharya, 2014; Acharya & Buzan, 2019; Bilgin, 2016) have advanced a new research agenda to address such criticism and engage the unresolved tensions between Area Studies and IR. Global IR calls for a more bottom-up, decentralised approach to IR, which pays due recognition to non-Western histories, geographies, and epistemologies in order to explore the complex web of relations underpinning today’s international system more thoroughly. Building on this approach, recent scholarship has put forward an investigation of Africa from the point of view of Global IR (Bischoff et al., 2016). These studies aim at enhancing the role of African theories and practices, concepts and methods, authors and cases, with a view to tackling the perceived marginalisation of the continent in IR literature. In keeping with the principal aim of this edited volume, this chapter critically engages this emerging literature and the roles it assigns to Africa in shaping international politics and IR theories. In particular, we question two of the fundamental assumptions of the Global IR scholarship focusing on Africa, arguing that they err by excess of realism—in two different ways. On the one hand, the claim that Africa is peripheral to IR thinking holds true only as long as one takes a reductionist view that makes IR coincide with (some variant of) Realism,1 and its focus on materialism, structuralism, Westphalian sovereignty, and great powers. While Africa has indeed remained in the background in the study of great power politics, recent developments have considerably expanded the agenda of IR scholarship, making room for theories and approaches in which Africa features prominently. On the other hand, the Global IR commitment to better inventory, appreciate, and build upon contributions that are “non-Western” is ontologically unconvincing. We argue that it is too realist, in the sense that it fails to recognise that in a globalised world based on increasing transnational exchanges and shared and interconnected histories the West and the non-West are entangled in a dialectical relationship that makes one constitutive of the other. Non-Western regions, in fact, should not be understood as a given reality that is “out there”, before the passive contemplation of a neutral observer, but as a cognitive construction that theories and practices actively shape and perform, as critical approaches to regional studies (Neumann, 2003; Söderbaum, 2016) have long 1

By “Realism” with a capital R we refer to the realist school of thought of international relations, so as to distinguish it from “realism” with a small R, by which we refer here to the ontological stance characterising the world “out there” as objectively given and thought-independent.

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recognised. From this perspective, apprehending the contribution of Africa to Global IR cannot be reduced to just “add[ing] Africa and stir[ring]” (Abrahamsen, 2016a). Instead, it requires an effort to unearth the constitutive conditions that have made Africa come into being as the other of its own other, be it the dominating West, civilised Europe, the rich Global North, the Islamic Umma, and so on (Shani, 2008). The question over Africa’s “place” in IR therefore has a double sense, both theoretical-metaphorical and material-ontological. It concerns, respectively, Africa’s role in the literature of IR, understood as a scholarly discipline, and the physical place Africa occupies on the map of international politics; in other words, where, how, and by whom the constitutive boundaries defining its identity are drawn. Much of the literature that has already addressed these questions is characterised by implicit realist assumptions, both in the sense of theoretical IR Realism and ontological realism. Toning such assumptions down, we argue, makes it possible to depart from recurring tropes and generate new insights into the “place” of Africa and IR. To demonstrate this, we first review the complex relationship between IR and Africanist scholarship. We show that in the past few decades Africa has moved from the periphery of the discipline to its core, not only as a provider of case studies that systematically deviate from a presumed norm(ality) coinciding with “the West”, but also as a paradigmatic case for theory-building whose interest and validity are increasingly seen as generalisable beyond Africa itself. This is also because, just while Africa was shifting away from its alleged marginality in IR scholarship, the centre of concern of (Realist) IR scholarship was fading away as part of the “postparadigmatic” turn in IR thinking. The second part of this chapter provides a case for unsettling reified conceptions of Africa. It unearths longstanding uncertainties about the boundaries of Africa, showing that Africa’s very identity is contingent on shifting worldviews and dialectical relationships. It focuses particularly on the case of the Sahara-Sahel, a quintessential liminal space which has alternatively articulated the inside/outside dichotomy of the continent, and therefore provides a prism with which to explore in detail how the opposition between Africa and “the West” (and the rest) is socially constructed and historically contingent. In conclusion, we draw some lessons from our analysis of the place of Africa in IR with a view to charting a way for a “less realist” approach to Global IR: one that remains loyal to the commitment to plurality and complexity by recognising the dialectical and hybrid nature of regions and areas.

2 The Place of Africa in IR Literature 2.1 Paradigmatic IR and the marginality of Africa The place and role of Africa in the international system have long been underresearched. At the dawn of modernity, the trades of gold, slaves, and weapons in and from Africa arguably played a crucial role in the establishment of an international

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system of states, in Europe and beyond (Grip, 2015). By deliberately excluding genealogical questions from their investigations, though, mainstream IR theories have attracted criticism for being unable to explain how “a singular post-Columbian world system” has come into being (Ruggie, 1993). Similarly, much of the historiography of IR (Schmidt B., 2013) has failed to recognise that Africa’s entanglement in the defining moments in the history of international relations, not only as a side effect but often as a trigger. The colonisation of Africa cannot be separated from the “central conflicts” (Modelski, 1987) among European powers in the late nineteenth century, including the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–71 and the Russian-Ottoman war of 1877–78. Diplomatic incidents occasioned by colonial enterprises in Africa—such as the so-called “Slap of Tunis” between France and Italy in 1881, and the Fashoda Incident between Britain and France in 1898—almost tore the European alliance blocs apart, thereby shaking the foundation of international order and paving the way for World War I. Africa during colonisation has also been the testing ground for warfare techniques that dramatically subsequent centuries: concentration camps in the Boer war (Van Heyningen, 2009); the military use of airpower in the colonial conquest of Libya (Van Creveld, 2012); and the counter-insurgency doctrines first developed by the French in North Africa, which would prove so influential in the American conduct of military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq (Porch, 2013). These observations notwithstanding, many scholars have acknowledged the peripherality of Africa to IR thinking (Abrahamsen, 2016a). This has arguably had something to do with the hegemonic status of Realism in IR theorising (Brown, 2006), a school of thought which became so dominant in American academia, and beyond, that its boundaries almost came to coincide with those of the IR discipline in its entirety (Guzzini, 1998). Primarily concerned with great power politics, the (neo-)Realism research programme focused its attention on the states “that make the most difference” (Waltz, 1979, 73), “because these states dominate and shape international politics” (Mearsheimer, 2001, 17). It comes as no surprise, then, that African states endowed with limited military and economic capabilities remained at the margins of an IR thinking dominated by the Realists’ concerns, standards, and methods. At the same time, the so-called “behavioural revolution” in American social sciences contributed to downgrading the epistemological value of region and Area Studies (Katzenstein, 2002). Africa was no exception. Contributions by Africa specialists, as well as those of other areas, were then seen as particularistic knowledge, hierarchically subordinated to the more generalisable, universality-aspiring insights produced by IR and other social sciences via statistic modelling. Theoretical contributions produced by scholars working on, in, and from Africa were thus captured in the “perennial contest between partisans of ‘nomothetic’ approaches […] and ‘idiographic’ approaches” (Kennedy, 1997), with a limited impact on IR theory development. While the marginality of Africa during this phase of IR thinking is evident, the justifiability for it is less convincing, even from within the Realist theoretical framework. One could claim, after all, that Africa exhibited some of the most important frictions of great power politics during the Cold War (Schmidt E., 2013). As the cases of Zaire/DRC, Angola, Ethiopia, Somalia, Egypt, and others illustrate, superpower

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competition over the postcolonial order arguably shows Africa to be the region in which the differences between the states that make the most difference stand out most clearly. Be that as it may, the alleged peripherality of Africa in IR thinking becomes much less pronounced as soon as a narrow focus on Realism and mainstream positivism gives way to greater theoretical pluralism. For the development of world system theory and dependency theory, for instance, Africa has contributed not only with valuable case studies, but also with world leading research centres and scholars, as the case of the University of Dar es-Salaam illustrates (Sharp, 2013). Similarly, the decline of neorealism’s hegemonic status in IR thinking has brought Africa back in (Harman & Brown, 2013) as a valuable case with which to develop and test alternative theoretical approaches. In a world of regions (Katzenstein, 2005), the rise of the African Union and its collective security mechanisms has prompted analyses inspired by theoretical approaches as diverse as liberal institutionalism (Engels & Gomes Porto 2010), “new” regionalism (Grant & Söderbaum, 2003), practice theory (Bueger, 2016), and constructivism (Williams, 2009), to name but a few. Constructivism has also provided the theoretical toolkit for generating important insights on international humanitarian (Campbell, 2003) and peacebuilding (Autesserre, 2010) interventions, studies whose influence has spanned well beyond the field of Africa specialists. Nevertheless, critics contend that these studies have failed to convincingly offset the longstanding marginalisation of Africa from the study of international politics. Three main observations are put forward to support this claim. In the first place, it has been noted that “while Africa is the site of many issue-based studies and provides empirically detailed accounts of international relations, many such accounts remain at arm’s length from core conceptual and theoretical debates in IR” (Harman & Brown, 2013, 70). Reiterating the oft-noticed subordination of Area Studies, Africa is seen at best as a case study providing additional raw data to illustrate or test a general theory deducted from elsewhere—typically from observation of the behaviour of the states that continue to make the most difference. Hardly challenging the fundamental disciplinary assumption of mainstream IR, this attitude has been dubbed “add Africa and stir” (Abrahamsen, 2016a). The second observation is that Africa is often incorporated into IR theorising not only as a case study, but typically as a deviant case, “wheeled on to the stage as representative of whatever delinquency, from state failure to the drugs trade, is exercising the analyst” (Harman & Brown, 2013, 70). African institutions and practices are typically seen as providing a poor fit for the standard application of IR theories. This incidentally reinforces the view of a Western norm(ality) opposed to an African exception. Looking at the building blocks of the international system, for instance, concepts such as quasi-state (Jackson, 1991), collapsed state (Zartman, 1995), shadow state (Reno, 1995), and criminalised state (Bayart et al., 1999), referring to cases as diverse as, respectively, Ghana, Somalia, Sierra Leone, and South Africa, illustrate how African states have been almost endlessly pathologised (Abrahamsen, 2016a), most notably in the 1990s.

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The third reason for scepticism highlights the limited consideration for African agency in IR debates. Viewing the weakness of African states as a shortcut to analytical irrelevance, scholars have placed a considerable, and often exaggerated, emphasis on how international dynamics and material constraints shape African politics, with little consideration for local forms of agency (Herbst, 2000). To be fair, however, one should acknowledge the extensive criticism levelled against this reductionist view of Africa as a passive recipient of policies designed abroad and imported inertly with disastrous consequences. Scholars have showed how African elites have skilfully exploited (and manipulated) the opportunity structure created by international dynamics for domestic political purposes (Bayart & Ellis, 2000; Chabal & Daloz, 1999; Clapham, 1996; Soulé, 2020), prompting the conclusion that Africa in international politics is an actor, and not just acted upon (Brown, 2012). Overall, then, one could claim that while the hegemony of Realism resulted in the substantial disregard—if not exclusion—of African realities from IR debates, the emergence of theoretical pluralism since the 1990s has led to a remarkable comeback of Africa in IR thinking. Although not without ambiguities, African cases, problems, and thinkers have significantly contributed to the expansion of the research agenda of many emerging IR paradigms. With the compartmentalisation of IR theory development in a plurality of paradigms (Guzzini, 1998), however, African cases almost never featured among the paradigmatic cases providing the key explanation or demonstration of an emerging theory.

2.2 Post-paradigmatic IR and the Centrality of Africa This trend has considerably changed in the “post-paradigmatic” phase of IR thinking. The state of the IR discipline today is characterised less by grand meta-theoretical debates than by efforts to bridge the gaps across paradigms and refine existing theories against concrete policy problems (Dunne et al., 2013; Sil & Katzenstein, 2010). This approach rests more or less explicitly on a pragmatist set of assumptions. By practising theoretical pluralism and analytical eclecticism, recent IR scholarship addresses research questions that are issue-oriented and practice-driven, rather than theory-driven. By fostering inter-paradigmatic cross-fertilisation, contemporary IR research seeks to illuminate concrete policy dilemmas that are substantively related but normally formulated in separate paradigms. This contributes to explaining the growing relevance of Africa to today’s IR debates. From the perspective of the pragmatist turn in IR scholarship, Africa offers an unparalleled wealth of concrete policy dilemmas “that, while of interest to scholars, bear at least implicitly on concrete challenges facing social and political actors” (Sil & Katzenstein, 2010, 20), both domestically and internationally. Africa in fact provides a privileged field in which to identify and address policy-relevant puzzles, and to explore the analytical and problem-solving purchase of emerging theoretical approaches. In other words, Africa’s conceptualisation as a “standard deviation” from political normality, which once underpinned its peripherality in IR, has

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become the reason for its renewed centrality. In the post-paradigmatic phase of IR thinking, problems that appear intractable from within the constraining parameters of a single paradigm provide unique opportunities for building new approaches that bridge across paradigmatic divides. There is no shortage of illustrations of this argument. The remainder of this section singles out three policy areas in which reflections originating from African cases and problems have stimulated scholars to push the boundaries of IR thinking. The impact of such theoretical and conceptual developments has spanned well beyond the realm of African specialists, thereby making Africa a laboratory of the emerging theory and practice of international politics. The first of these examples has to do with the study of conflicts. Africa has spearheaded the remarkable worldwide rise in intra-state conflicts and civil wars following the end of the Cold War. It is therefore unsurprising that much of the (now burgeoning) literature on new wars (Kaldor, 1999) and their political economy (Berdal & Malone, 2000; Collier & Hoeffler, 1999) was first devised and refined by building largely on African cases, to the extent that early civil war explanations and models were criticised for their alleged “African bias” (Gutiérrez Sanin, 2004). That initial Africanist imprint has largely faded away, and civil war studies have now become a firmly established field of research of comparative and international politics, with well-funded departments in the most respected universities worldwide. The second example concerns the cornerstone of the international system: the concept of sovereignty. As already observed, there is no shortage of scholarly works finding African states somehow defective vis-à-vis the ideal type of Westphalian statehood and sovereignty. Interestingly, however, recent scholarship has found that concepts of “deviant” statehood originally coined to describe African realities can be applied well beyond Africa, including in the global North. In spite of all its ambiguities, the extraordinary success of the concept of “failed state” testifies to this (Bueger & Bethke, 2014). First introduced by Africanists in reference to economic and political crises befalling African states, the concept was soon catapulted onto the international stage in a widely read Foreign Affairs article, and used to describe cases “from Haiti in the Western Hemisphere to the remnants of Yugoslavia in Europe, from Somalia, Sudan, and Liberia in Africa to Cambodia in Southeast Asia” (Helman & Ratner, 1992, 3). Eventually, the notion of failed state became the cornerstone of the “Bush Doctrine” (White House, 2002), arguably one of the most influential pieces of foreign policy since the end of World War II. The concept of neopatrimonialism exhibits a comparable trajectory. It was first introduced to apprehend and catalogue a bizarre deviation from the trajectory of modernisation, one that had not been foreseen by Max Weber but which was observed in Central Africa (Médard, 1982). Recently, however, influential scholarship has introduced neopatrimonialism to the toolkit of mainstream social sciences to describe relevant dynamics of international politics observed “in Africa and beyond” (Bach & Gazibo, 2012), including the Philippines and Brazil, Italy and France. The notion of hybridity offers another valuable example. First evoked to describe the anomaly of postcolonial state-building in Africa (Ekeh, 1975), it has recently gained currency in core IR debates on political ordering (Boege et al., 2008), international peacebuilding (Belloni, 2012), and comparative institutionalism (Helmke & Levitsky, 2004). Pooled together, these observations may lead

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one to conclude that, when looking at the international system with empirical accuracy, “African-type” states may be less an anomaly in need of explanation than the rule that demands to be understood. As the rigid assumptions of previous conceptualisations about the core attributes of sovereign statehood are being softened, influential scholarship has proved eager to make room for postcolonial and postmodern statehood as fully fledged paradigms of sovereignty in international relations, alongside modern, Westphalian statehood (Sørensen, 2001). Closely related to the changing understanding of statehood in IR, the third example refers to the study of governance. While Africa has been poorly represented on the stage of global governance issues, it has offered a variety of meso- and micro-level cases to the empirical investigation of governance without government (Rosenau & Czempiel, 1992). Research in and on Africa has therefore proved instrumental for governance theory-building, with important contributions to theoretical perspectives as diverse as liberalism (Rotberg, 2004), constructivism (Risse, 2011), and neoinstitutionalism (Menkhaus, 2006). Critical approaches to governance, too, have found fertile ground in Africa. Seminal studies in this domain have explored the intersection between security and development in Africa by leveraging neo-Gramscian (Harrison, 2004) and Foucauldian (Duffield, 2001) perspectives on governance. African dynamics have also provided quintessential cases for the development of issue-based analyses of governance. Among them, it is worth mentioning influential pieces of research on the contribution of private actors and capitals in the provision of public goods, from structural adjustment programmes (SAP) to security sector reforms (SSR) (Abrahamsen, 2016b; Taylor, 2010). Africa-focused research has also paved the way for the study of (global) health governance. The global response to HIV/AIDS in Africa has provided a seminal case study through which to explore multi-level governance of health and broader human security, including issues of coordination, hierarchy, and partnership (Brown, 2009; Poku et al., 2007). More recently, the Ebola pandemic in West Africa offered a valuable case with which to investigate the harmonisation of the regional and global governance of health crises (Ifediora & Aning, 2017). Africa has therefore provided a paradigmatic, textbook case for the development of health governance theories and practices, exercising a major influence on the research agenda of governance and security studies well beyond the continent’s boundaries (MacLean & MacLean, 2009). The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to magnify the relevance of this body of literature. To conclude, then, recent studies on issues as important as conflicts, sovereignty, and governance appear to have benefitted greatly from concepts, methods, and heuristic cases that were first introduced in Africa. Critics may contend that while these issues might well be important, they remain peripheral to IR theorising, as long as IR is conceived as the science that investigates the foreign behaviour of the states that, owing to their power, dominate and shape international politics. We find such sceptical remarks misplaced. Not only because changing international dynamics make Africa today the ideal observatory for the investigation of the rise of emerging countries (Taylor, 2014), while virtually all the great powers are intent on developing and implementing “Africa Strategies” (Faleg & Palleschi, 2020). But also, and more importantly, because civil wars, neopatrimonial statehood, and multi-stakeholder

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governance are the cutting edge of a more theoretically aware IR research agenda that has long acknowledged the artificiality of the inside/outside threshold in international politics (Walker, 1992). Although Africa-focused studies tend to shy away from grand theoretical claims, a sobering endeavour to mid-range theorising remains no less cogent, and arguably more attuned to a post-paradigmatic development of cutting-edge IR scholarship.

3 Africa and the Ontological Realism of Global IR 3.1 Areas as Dialectical Constructs and the Case of Africa Discussing the place of Africa in a globalised IR discipline should also imply exploring the connotative and denotative values of “Africa”: that is, respectively, how the label “Africa” is mobilised in discourse, and what non-discursive entity it refers to, if any. The very conception and definition of the continent have never been fixed or uncontested, and its inclusion in the wider research agenda cannot overlook the historical, political, and intellectual processes that have constructed Africa as a presumably independent object of the international system. Even if the “spatial turn” in social sciences has opened the way to a reconceptualisation of sub-system units—such as regions and areas—in terms of constructed socio-relational categories open to change (Waever, 2020), most of the Global IR literature tends to treat areas as a pre-given object of inquiry. The existence of an area is implicitly assumed as an ontological given, determined by its intrinsic characteristics, and preceding its relations with other units. Global IR’s ontological “realism” is arguably rooted in the historical trajectory of one of the most important disciplines that has informed Global IR, namely Area Studies. The origins of Area Studies are intrinsically connected to the colonial expansion of European powers (Khosrowjah, 2011). Accordingly, the identification and delimitation of an area were principally influenced by the political and “civilizing” needs of the conquerors, who required the social sciences to elaborate the knowledge necessary to understand, control, and discipline people and societies outside of Europe. In this sense, the distinction between an Anglo-American Middle East and a French Proche-Orient well captures the potential shifts and overlapping of Area Studies and its relation of dependence with historically situated political contingencies (Capdepuy, 2008). In a similar vein, the rise of Area Studies in the United States was decisively favoured by the beginning of the Cold War and the US hegemony in the West (Katzenstein, 2002). Accordingly, the identification and definition of an area should never be seen as autonomous from the power structures, historical legacies, and contingent interests characterising the international system at a specific time (Bilgin, 2004). What is more, the “bordering processes” (Walker, 1992) that have brought areas into being are not only expressions of specific power relations, but also serve as

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exercises of identity-building. As Said (1978) convincingly demonstrated in the case of the “Oriental” world, the construction of an area is about power and conquest as much as it is about constructing a presumed Other in order to define a Self. Consequently, Global IR risks reiterating an essential ontological assumption: nonWestern worlds and their contribution to global affairs should not be studied because they add to the history of the West, but because they—the West and the non-West— would simply not exist without one another. Following these premises, the emergence and (re-)definition of “Africa”, intended as an object of intellectual inquiry and a building block of the international system, must be understood as the result of different political projects which have evolved and intersected over time: while the ontological and geographical contours of Africa are often seen as reified, the identification of an African area has in fact been shaped, negotiated, and remade by a vast and heterogeneous group of “regionbuilders” (Paasi, 2001), including Western thinkers and policy makers, international organisations, or local states. From this perspective, the partition of Africa delineated by Hegel proved seminal in shaping European processes of identity and otherness building. In his Philosophy of History, Hegel divided Africa into three regions: North Africa, which he called “European Africa”; northeast Africa, which he termed “the land of the Nile”; and then “Africa proper”, the land to the south and the west. He considered North Africa and the Nile Valley to be extensions of Europe and Asia respectively. Of “Africa Proper”, the land to the south and west, which provided slaves for the transatlantic trade, Hegel opined: “Africa proper, as far as history goes back, has remained for all purposes of connection with the rest of the world – shut up” (Hegel, 2007, 91). The judgement expressed vis-à-vis “Africa Proper”—mostly corresponding to what we consider today as forming Sub-Saharan Africa—contributed decisively in creating the image of a continent without agency in the international system, a space consequently open to penetration and conquest by “external” powers and civilisations, whether these be European colonisers or Arab conquerors of the Middle Ages (Bayart & Ellis, 2000). In this sense, the partition proposed by Hegel significantly influenced the way Europeans (and Westerners more generally) interpreted, divided, and categorised Sub-Saharan Africa. The clearest example is represented by the distinction between “Arab” and “African” populations and subjects, and the consequent division between “white” and “black” Africas. Driven by a racialised interpretation of African politics, the European empires created explicit hierarchies among the polities and the societies that they conquered, generally according to Arab descendants and North African polities a higher level of civilisation and a sort of right to be co-opted and act as ruling agents over less developed black people (Hall, 2011). This arbitrary ethnic, geographical, and political distinction was also reiterated in academia, where the division of labour between the “orientalists” and the “ethnographers” sanctioned a civilisational cleavage between a complex and multifaceted Middle East and “primitive” black Africa (Aïdi et al., 2020). Despite being historically contingent, the division between North and SubSaharan Africa continues to shape political, economic, and security dynamics at the continental level. On the one hand, the anti-colonial struggles that followed the

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first great wave of African independences in the 1960s offer a clear representation of the impact and persisting tensions generated by this normative and political division. African leaders such as Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, Mali’s Modibo Keita, or Algeria’s Ahmed Ben Bella called for a full political integration of the newly independent Africa based on sovereignty sharing, as the only way to emancipate and preserve the continent from external influences (Hartmann, 2016). This emancipatory and anticolonial approach paved the way for the creation of Pan-African organisations such as the Organization of African Unity (OUA, from 2002 the African Union) or the African Development Bank. On the other hand, the normative commitment to continental unity and emancipation set Africa’s regionalism sharply at odds with Area Studies, given the latter’s colonial rooting and its disciplinary distinction between North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa. As a result of this persisting ambiguity, the call to unity of Pan-Africanists did not fully succeed in redefining African politics. Divisions and mistrust between states and sub-regions persisted, and along with enduring transnational tensions and conflicting loyalties they finally hampered the implementation of a unified political project for Africa (Bach, 2015). Within this context, North African countries have typically featured a sort of double identity, and are usually recognised more as members of the Arab and/or Middle Eastern world than as representatives of the African region. These same countries have fashioned their strategies in order to exploit their position “in-between” two worlds. Egypt under Nasser was a central actor in developing and sustaining Pan-Africanist as well as Pan-Arabist political projects. In a similar vein, Khadafy’s Libya tried to reassert its role and influence as an Africa-focused leader, following two decades in which the regime’s attention had mostly been directed at the Middle East (Huliaras, 2001). Morocco, for its part, has long built closer ties to the European Union than to the African Union. Additional examples contribute to clarifying how the nature and contours of Africa are not ontologically given, but contested—something that the Global IR literature fails to acknowledge. The inclusion of Madagascar in/as Africa, and the exclusion of Yemen, are, after all, a social construction, reified into a fact that a critical approach should strive to unsettle (Aïdi et al., 2020). While Madagascar is an island 500 miles away from the African coast that presents specific and autonomous historical and ethnic features, Yemen is historically, geographically, and politically in between the Arab Peninsula and East Africa: its political, social, and economic dynamics are strongly interconnected with those of the African countries on the other side of the Red Sea (Donelli, 2020). The case of apartheid South Africa offers yet another counterintuitive: the country was placed in the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) category by the World Bank for years (Aïdi et al., 2020), presumably because its social and racial characteristics undermined othering processes. The ontological realism of Global IR, then, arguably reproduces a discourse of marginality of non-Western Areas, and Africa in particular. By reifying areas, Global IR critically overlooks the co-constitutive relations that make areas empty signifiers, unless they are linked to one another.

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3.2 The Sahara-Sahel: Dividing, Connecting, Constructing “Africas” Africa provides a valuable case to problematise the ontological assumptions of Global IR. To this end, this section discusses the genealogy of one of its most important “internal frontier”, the Sahara-Sahel, to show how “Africa” is a social construct made and remade in relational and dialectical opposition to other social aggregates and spatial imaginaries.2 Accordingly, specific and fixed “African” features do not exist as such, but emerge from the contingent intersection of historical legacies, systemic pressures, and “local” transformations. The Sahara-Sahel represents a fault line which can be seen both as an insulator, dividing different areas, and as a connector tying together Africa’s constitutive sameness. According to a historical and geographical tradition that runs from Kant to Braudel, the Sahara and the Sahel represent, respectively, the largest “sea of sand” of the planet and its vast semi-arid shores.3 Taken together, they form a spatial aggregate which can simultaneously connect or divide the Mediterranean world from black Africa, and their role has changed over the centuries (McDougall & Scheele, 2012). Consequently, exploring the very definition and emergence of the SaharaSahel region is key to understanding how “Africa” has historically come into being, and how it has been defined and delimited in relation to its Mediterranean and/or European other. The Sahara-Sahel has in fact been designated through a dialectical process which has defined the area on the basis of what it is not, rather than considering what characterises it. In accordance with this framing, the Sahara-Sahel has become a space of “exception” (in the sense employed and developed by Agamben, 2005): either an alterity taken in (ex-capio) from the (European) outside, or a “barbarian” other in which foreign actors project the origins of various security threats to keep at bay. This definition of the Sahara-Sahel as a threshold separating the civilised Mediterranean world from Sub-Saharan Africa is deeply anchored in history. Indeed, the Greek historian Herodotus described the Sahara as the southern edge of the civilised world, a “natural” barrier dividing civilisation from anarchy (Mattheis et al., 2018, 42). At the same time, this vision of the area as the place of transition from order to chaos, but also as a unitary and distinguished geographical space, was adopted and reified by the Arab travellers, merchants, and preachers who explored the area many centuries later. During the Middle Ages, Arab penetration beyond the Sahara and along the routes of the intra-African trade decisively contributed to crystallising the representation of the Sahara-Sahel as a liminal and bordering space. Arab thinkers such as Ibn Khaldun advanced a vision of Africa as being hierarchically organised on a racial basis. Like the European colonisers later, they consequently distinguished 2

We nevertheless acknowledge that other socially constructed partitions of/in Africa do exist, which have generated persisting socio-political effects on the continent: namely, the “exogenously” imposed distinction between a Francophone and an Anglophone Africa has greatly contributed to hampering the Pan-African project (Ackah, 2020) and undermining Africa’s “sameness”. 3 The term Sahel comes from the Arab word Sah¯ıl—“shore”.

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between a “white” and a “black” Africa (the Bilad al-Sudan), and identified the Sahara-Sahel as the fault line between the two (Lydon, 2009). The identification of the Sahara-Sahel area as a space of chaotic otherness was also reaffirmed; through the use of the notion of badiyya (literally “the savage land”), the Arab chroniclers attributed to the Sahara Desert a normative connotation in opposition to those lands inhabited by Arab populations where legal and religious norm(ality) define and sustain order and civilisation (McDougall & Scheele, 2012). The European colonisation confirmed and reinforced the dialectical bordering process performed by the Sahara-Sahel. The politique des races became the governing and disciplining principle adopted by the French administration for ruling and distinguishing between the populations under their rule (Baldaro & Raineri, 2020). While the application of the indigénat legislative code to Sub-Saharan and Sahelian populations confirmed the “exceptional” status of the latter, the inclusion of North Africa within the same system of civil law applied in Europe reinforced the ontological distinction between these two “worlds” occupying the same continent (Bonnecase & Brachet, 2013). While the image of the Sahara-Sahel as an insulator has been constructed and reified over the centuries, this remains only one possible interpretation of the role and nature of this region. The term “Sahel” first made its appearance in the seventeenth century in two of the most important Arab chronicles of the time. The Ta’rikh al-Fattash and the Ta’rikh al-Sudan narrate the stories of two of the most extensive and flourishing Islamic kingdoms of the period, namely the Mali and Songhay Empires. Built around the cities of Gao and Timbuktu and controlling Trans-Saharan trade routes, the two kingdoms were presented as empires of the Sahel, two polities whose cultural influence was perceived from Cairo to the Gulf of Guinea and beyond (Bonnecase & Brachet, 2013). The importance of the Mali and Songhay Empires testifies to the centrality of the Trans-Saharan trade, a fundamental connecting phenomenon that blurred the distinction between a North and a Sub-Saharan Africa. In keeping with this, it must be underlined that the economic, social, ecological, and spatial organisations of the Sahara-Sahel has always favoured the mobility and exchange of goods and persons, in a process that has shaped the very identity of local communities. This process has created an integrated socio-economic system, with the Sahara at its centre, that continues to influence inter-African circular migratory movements today (Scheele, 2012). The tension between these two visions of the Sahara-Sahel resurfaced in the twentieth century. On the one hand, during the 1950s and the 1960s the SaharaSahelian zone was reorganised following the rationalist and modernising approaches promoted by international organisations and donors in the “developing world”, or Global South, including both North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa (Wood & Ryden, 1992). On the other hand, the oil crisis of the 1970s, coupled with the devastating climatic crises that affected the Sahel in those decades, contributed to deepening the gulf between North and Sub-Saharan Africas, driving the economic and political trajectories of these two regions apart. These events, at least in part caused by the attempt to advance economic development through the promotion of homogenising institutional and managerial blueprints for the whole African continent, decisively

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contributed to shaping the identity and functioning of the Sahara-Sahel, eventually (re)transforming the region into a space of exception, an insulator where emergency forms of governmentality have become the new normal (Mann, 2015). The security concerns which have come to characterise the international perception of and approach to the Sahara-Sahel since the beginning of the 2000s have also reiterated and sanctioned the role of the region as the border and dividing space between Europe and North Africa, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Indeed, the SaharaSahel is now seen as “Europe’s Southern border” (Raineri & Strazzari, 2019) and a part of that “Enlarged Neighbourhood” (EEAS, 2016) that in the EU’s official documents creates a new distinction—and an implicit hierarchy—between North Africa—a central part of EU’s near neighbourhood—and the rest of the continent. It remains questionable whether these emerging policies, discourses, and practices of bordering recapture the Sahara-Sahel in the orbit of Europe, dragging it away from the African centre of gravity, or rather confine the Sahel to a permanent otherness vis-àvis Europe. What is clear, however, is that they reconfirm and perform the imaginary of the Sahara-Sahel as a threshold between two distinct Africas. Notably, this spatial imaginary hides, but is premised on, the persisting interconnections of the Saharan frontier, starting with intra-African migrations and trans-Saharan exchanges, which make of the Sahara-Sahel a connector and integrator of different “areas”. Incidentally, the “Sahel as a border” imaginary contributes to disrupting the socio-economic organisation and livelihoods of local communities (Bøås, 2021). The European approach towards the African continent thus continues to (re)produce borders and construct spaces that shape the meaning, the concept, and the study of “Africa”. With its blindness to ontology, genealogy, and dialectics, Global IR scholarship exhibits an implicit and unproblematised ontological “realism”. As the case of the Sahel suggests, Global IR reiterates and reinforces the reification of the non-Western areas, thereby limiting its emancipatory potential.

4 Conclusion Running against a widespread (mis-)conception, this chapter has shown that Africa has gained a prominent place in international relations, both as a practice and as a discipline. As the hegemony of the Realist school of international relations subsides, Africa has provided a rich and differentiated field of study, able to offer a central contribution to the conceptual, theoretical, and empirical debates of a post-paradigmatic IR discipline. At the same time, while supporting the main premises informing the current debates on Global IR and comparative regionalism, the chapter has insisted on the need to further problematise the ontological basis which frames the discussion of areas and regions. Africa, like any other region, is not a given reality “out there”, but is rather a historical and social construct whose origins and genealogy have been formulated in dialectical relations with the other units of the international system. As Neumann (1996) already remarked, social units qualify and identify themselves

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(the “Self”) in function of and in relation to an internal and/or external “Other”. Accordingly, Africa does not exist per se, but only in relation and in opposition to other regions and constructed identities, whether these be Europe, the Middle East, the Arab world, or others. Global IR should be open to question ontological realism and embrace a dialectical approach to regional and Area Studies, one which sees particularism and specialisation as the result of interactions endowed with ontological precedence. Consequently, studying Africa would not only serve the “decentralisation side” of the Global IR agenda; knowing Africa’s history, exploring African politics, and listening to academic voices from the continent itself are all necessary strategies for understanding the origins, development, and functioning of the other regions of the world too, starting with “the West”. At the same time, investigating the African contribution to the definition, continual reconstruction, and contestation of the international system, as much as the development of “Western” societies or the globalised chain of production, should all become central strategies for developing a discipline that is able to be effectively Global. Accordingly, by highlighting the existing interconnections and the process of co-constitution which characterises the relation between Africa and the rest of the international system, a Global discipline of IR is not only necessary for understanding international politics but, even more important, it is also emancipatory, as it defies reified categorisations, hierarchical assumptions, and implicit power projects.

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Söderbaum, F. (2016). Old, new, and comparative regionalism. In T. A. Börzel & T. Risse (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of comparative regionalism (pp. 16–37). Oxford University Press. Sørensen, G. (2001). Changes in statehood: the transformation of international relations. Palgrave, Basingstoke. Soulé, F. (2020). ‘Africa+1’ summit diplomacy and the ‘new scramble’ narrative: Recentering African agency. African Affairs, 119(477), 633–646. https://doi.org/10.1093/afraf/adaa015 Taylor, I. (2010). Governance and relations between the European Union and Africa: The case of NEPAD. Third World Quarterly, 31(1), 51–67. https://doi.org/10.1080/01436590903557322 Taylor, I. (2014). Africa rising? BRICS – diversifying dependency. Boydell and Brewer. Van Creveld, M. (2012). The age of airpower: Its rise and fall. Public Affairs. Van Heyningen, E. (2009). The concentration camps of the South African (Anglo-Boer) war, 1900– 1902. History Compass, 7(1), 22–43. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1478-0542.2008.00562.x Waever, D. (2020). Spatiality and world politics. In Oxford research encyclopedia of international studies (online resource). International Studies Association and Oxford University Press. Retrieved November 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.562 Walker, R. B. J. (1992). Inside/Outside. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Waltz, K. (1979). Theory of international politics. McGrow-Hill. White House (2002). National security strategy of the United States of America. Williams, P. (2009). The peace and security council of the African Union: Evaluating an embryonic international institution. Journal of Modern African Studies, 47(4), 603–626. https://doi.org/10. 1017/S0022278X09990048 Wood, A. P., & Ryden, P. (Eds.). (1992). The IUCN Sahel studies: 1991. World Conservation Union. Zartman, W. (1995). Collapsed States: the disintegration and restoration of legitimate authority. Lynne Rienner, Boulder.

Middle Eastern Studies and International Relations: Toward a Transformative Dialogue? Irene Costantini

and Ruth Hanau-Santini

Abstract This chapter investigates the post-2011 changing relationship between International Relations (IR) and Middle Eastern Studies (MES). The chapter departs from the assumption that the reading and writing of security in, on, and from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has historically been trapped between projection of security from abroad and endogenous security narratives. We argue that within the post-Arab uprisings renewed scholarly attention, with studies on security in, on, and from the MENA region expressing an all-time methodological pluralism and the increasing and original application of bottom-up and nonmilitary security understandings to regional security, societal and human security are among the most promising notions for transformative dialogue between IR and MES. In broader theoretical terms, we show how the ongoing debate on post-Weberian notions of statehood and post-Westphalian sovereignty point to an already transformative dialogue between IR and MES. The chapter illustrates this trend with two case studies—Tunisia and Iraq—pointing to changing security concepts reflecting changing security practices. Keywords Security · International relations · Area studies · Middle Eastern Studies · Middle East and North Africa

The following chapter was partially published in the Special Issue of the Italian Political Science Review titled ‘Reaching for allies? The dialectics and overlaps between International Relations and Area Studies in the study of politics, security and conflicts’), with the title ‘Waiting for IR Godot? In search of transformative encounters between Middle Eastern Studies and International Relations’, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/italian-political-science-review-rivista-ita liana-di-scienza-politica/article/waiting-for-ir-godot-in-search-of-transformative-encounters-bet ween-middle-eastern-studies-and-international-relations/9D25D18F1498BB55BBEEEF13F9D 15E6D. I. Costantini (B) · R. Hanau-Santini Università L’Orientale, Naples, Italy e-mail: [email protected] R. Hanau-Santini e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. D’Amato et al. (eds.), International Relations and Area Studies, Contributions to International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39655-7_4

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This chapter serves the purpose of looking at the relationship between Area Studies and International Relations from the vantage point of Middle Eastern Studies (MES) and with a focus on security. A security perspective is justified by the fact that the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, in itself a security-oriented construct (Bonine et al., 2012), has traditionally been at the center of international efforts at defining and addressing security/insecurity in international politics. During the Cold War, what prevailed among policymakers and scholars was a top-down, outwardoriented, and military focused approach to security guiding the study of international conflicts, alliances, and military arrangements (Bilgin, 2005, p. 4). The unipolar moment that followed revised mainstream understandings of security and since the turn of the twenty-first century, there has been a scholarly shift toward more bottomup, inward-oriented, and non-military approaches dealing with security issues. The range of security issues became increasingly focused with terrorism, state failure, and all its related corollary of poverty, crime, and regional conflict. This chapter considers 2011 a critical juncture for analyzing changing notions of security in, from, and on the MENA region. Domestically, the initially peaceful protests that erupted in Tunisia and Egypt and then spread to other countries across the region have led to regime change in Tunisia and Egypt, the outbreak of civil conflicts in Yemen, Syria, and Libya while they have been coopted and/or repressed in monarchical system where the status quo was thereby preserved, such as in Morocco and Bahrain. Besides modifying domestic notions of security, since 2010/11 domestic and regional dynamics impacted on international ones, as new interests in the “second image reversed”1 (Gourevitch, 1978) perspective is showing (Lynch, 2021). The 2011 uprisings, while in no way a unique occurrence, given the region’s deep history of social mobilization and conflicts, did act as catalyst for an evolving multipolar regional system characterized by, among others, deeply internationalized security, an intensification of threat perceptions and alternative security narratives as exemplified by the debate on sectarianism and sectarianisation (Hashemi & Postel, 2017; Mabon, 2020; Malmvig, 2014; Pomeps, 2020; Valbjørn, 2017). Security in the MENA region has been characterized by several critical junctures: the revolution in Iran in 1979; the 1991 Gulf war; the Iraq war in 2003. Although the extent to which 2011 represented a critical juncture is a matter of debate depending on the themes examined and the disciplinary stand (Bank & Busse, 2021), this chapter contends that it represented a critical juncture from a security perspective. While the 2010/11 uprisings originated in endogenous dynamics, these domestic trajectories have impacted regional security. The descent into localized civil conflicts turning into regional military confrontations and later into internationalized conflicts has shaken the already fragile post-2003 geopolitical status quo. In parallel, this has brought about a deep rethinking of dominating cognitive structures and explanatory approaches in Middle Eastern regional security studies. New studies have articulated debates surrounding notions of regional cold war, new interpretations of proxy wars and of proxy actors, identification of mobilization of identity versus ideology as enabling factors driving conflict. Scholars have engaged this new empirical material 1

The “second image reversed” looks at international sources of domestic politics.

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with IR notions, re-interpreting them and applying them to changing regional security dynamics. The chapter proposes a reflection on how security has been treated in the last decade in between MES and International Relations (IR) and presents the achievements and limits of this scholarship. It opens by tracing the uneasy relationship between Area Studies and IR for the study of the MENA region. Examining major perspectives on security in and on the region, it then extends the debate on the relationship between IR and Area Studies by taking into consideration categories of traditional security, on the one hand, and human and societal security, on the other hand. The chapter identifies two relevant post-2011 case studies, Tunisia and Iraq, as both have undergone regime change, have seen their security sectors—more or less profoundly reformed, have faced terrorism threats, albeit to different degrees, and illustrate significant instances of shifting concepts and practices of security. These case studies elaborate on the shift between regime, state, societal, and human security and how changing understandings reflect changing practices of security. Since 2011 the dialogue between IR and MES has become less hierarchical and more dialogic in a self-reflexive way. However, the promise of a transformative dialogue between the two lies in notions of human and societal security. MES has waited for IR Godot for decades, expecting a dialogue with International Relations’ Theory on an equal footing. While a transformative form of dialogue between the two is not there yet, acknowledging the progress and mutual learning occurred in the past decade suggests Godot might be in sight. The recent turns in IR revolving around hybridity for political systems, limited statehood, flexible understandings of governance configurations in parallel with MES’ attention toward the reconceptualization of statehood and security, categorizing the role of non-state actors and the varying governance formats are well positioned to grasp the empirical particularity within the theoretical universality of these concepts and frameworks.

1 MES and IR: Friends or Foes? The contentious relationship between MES and IR has a long history. The question is not so much whether there has been a dialogue between these disciplines, but the extent to which the nature and modalities of this dialogue, either eristic (characterized by strife and aimed at reproducing each scholarly identity), hierarchical (based on uneven division of labor in the academic epistemic hierarchy), selfreflexive (reflecting the limit of each field’s knowledge), or transformative (when two disciplines merge and create new understandings) have changed through time (Valbjørn, 2017). In the interwar period, there was an almost neat division of labor between Area Studies and social sciences: the former was expected to collect data based on the deep and multifaceted knowledge of the ground while the latter would have provided explanation for them grounded in universally valid theoretical frameworks (Mitchell,

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2004). The dichotomy between Area Studies and social science disciplines crystallized in the 1950s. This implied the creation of an epistemic hierarchy among disciplines whereby the production and organization of knowledge came to be premised on the binary separation between theoretical universality on the one hand and empirical and particular on the other (Teti, 2007)––thus, relegating Areas Studies to a hierarchically subordinate position: “the genealogy of Area Studies must be then understood in relation to the wider structuring of academic knowledge and to the struggles not of the Cold War but of [social science] as a twentieth-century political project” (Mitchell, 2004, p. 2). In this long and ever-evolving debate, now considered to be in a second generation phase (Busse, 2018), Area Studies—MES—were accused of being atheoretical, lacking methodological rigor, and were depicted as an antiquated pursuit (Tessler et al., 1999). In contrast, as underlined by Lisa Anderson (1999) in that same volume, insularity was an allegation that could have more easily been addressed to American political science, struggling to appreciate the context-specific nature of many social phenomena, failing to recognize the multilinearity of contemporary political change. If mainstream social science disciplines could be accused of being cultureblind, aiming at producing universal knowledge, Area Studies were accused of being culture-blinded (Valbjorn, 2004), upholding the idea that generalization had its limits. The 1990s Middle East Area Study Controversy (ASC) sought to break such disciplinary boundaries, calling for that cross-fertilization that in the early of the 2000s began to bear its fruits mostly in Europe and the Middle East (Bilgin, 2004; Teti, 2007; Valbjørn, 2004). In the American academia, the debate has not been revived since the 1990s. There, the combination of “methodological sophistication with significant field research and language skills”, “the escalating fetishization of method and prioritizing causal inference” and “changes in the publication expectations and the job market” has considerably reduced the salience of the ASC (Lynch, 2021). Historically, MES and IR have displayed difficulties in developing fruitful communication (Teti, 2007). The under-developed analytical exchange between MES and IR can be explained by referring to at least three factors. First, while Area Studies do incorporate political science concepts and/or theoretical frameworks, they also focus on issues that have a direct bearing on IR without necessarily displaying concepts or approaches stemming from IR theories. Second, the multidisciplinary nature of Area Studies renders them more scattered and fragmented as a field of study, less parsimonious, and not geared toward generalizability. As such, they face more difficulties in summarizing the state of the art, with even significant insights facing challenges in traveling in a transregional way through comparative approaches. Third, most studies produced by area scholars tend to be seen as valid insofar as they test IR theories, corroborate existing approaches, or provide new empirical material in support of existing IR theory, as in hierarchical forms of interdisciplinary dialogue. The opposite, the generation of new analytical or theoretical insights traveling from Area Studies to IR has proven more difficult, despite key exceptions (Ayubi, 1995; David, 1991), as have new transformative forms of dialogue generating new insights merging IR and MES. Within Area Studies, then, there is scarce dialogue among

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scholars working on different regions or eras, which is more pronounced than among scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds. While the debate between IR and MES continued along these lines, the events of 2011 sparked novel reflection on this divide in Europe and the MENA region. An initial observation pointed to the fact that “whereas the comparative-politics literature on the Arab uprisings and their aftermath demonstrates theoretical progress with sophisticated empirical analysis, there has been significantly less theoretical engagement by international relations (IR) theorists” (Lynch & Ryan, 2017, p. 643). Within this general trend, in the ensuing years there has been an effort to fill this gap, encouraging cross-fertilization between IR and MES to address specific themes, more in the direction of a self-reflexive dialogue, such as regional hegemony (Hinnebusch, 2019), the role of non-state actors in regional politics (Kausch, 2017) or the study of alliances (Darwich, 2021), as well to advance a meta-level reflection on the disciplines (Fawcett, 2017; Lynch & Ryan, 2017; Pomeps, 2015; Stetter, 2021). An effort at cross-fertilization has also been encouraged by the broader debate on the Global, Post-Western, Global South IR, and geo-cultural epistemologies and the loci of knowledge production (Abboud et al., 2018; Acharya & Buzan, 2019; Hazbun & Valbjørn, 2018; Tickner & Waever, 2008). In this temporal and geographical changing IR-MES dialogue, scholarship focused on security has always occupied a central position, displaying some of the tendencies identified above and discussed in more detail in the following sections.

2 Traditional Security: Between Theoretical Reflection and Empirical Reality Since 2011, IR scholarship has been left with the thorny issue of explaining the remarkable changes within the region that occurred beyond the uprisings, particularly with reference to security. Indeed, “since the Arab Uprisings, Middle East geopolitics has transformed from a system organized around and against a US-managed security architecture into a multipolar system lacking norms, institutions, or balancing mechanisms to constrain conflict and the use of force” (Hazbun, 2019, p. 14). Within this transformation and the academic debate that sought to grasp it, what security means in the region remains a challenging yet pressing question (Bilgin, 2005, 2015). Over the last ten years, the debate on security in, on, and from the MENA region has seen a resurgence of key security studies’ concepts and theoretical approaches––cold war, proxy wars, regional security complex. In IR and MES security-focused scholarship, be it on post-2011 Libya and Syria, post-2015 Yemen, or on the growing tensions between the Islamic Republic of Iran and Saudi Arabia, these concepts and theoretical approaches come with a heavy baggage, having been developed in relation to security dynamics of the past. The reference to the “Cold War” in MENA was first employed by Malcolm Kerr in the mid-1960s to define the regional balance of power between an anti-status quo

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republics’ socialist camp dominated by the Egyptian president Nasser’s soft power and a monarchical conservative camp, spearheaded by Saudi Arabia (Kerr, 1965). The Arab regional cold war reflected the main tenets of the broader Cold War in three ways. Firstly, it attributed high significance to ideology as the determining feature distinguishing the two opposing camps and their allies. Secondly, the two regional main powers mostly articulated their antagonism by manipulating regional countries’ tensions, waging proxy wars rather than direct military confrontations. Lastly, they shared a zero-sum game logic which was premised on the stark opposition between Nasser’s raison de la nation arabe and Sunni monarchies’ raison d’Etat (Valbjorn & Bank, 2012). The 1950s–1960s Arab cold war displayed an uncommonly high level of politicization around regional bipolarity: the securitization of ideological values and alliances framed the regional soft power rivalry. Studies, as the one by Kerr, on the specificities of the Arab cold war pointed to counter-intuitive arguments which however remained neglected in mainstream IR and security studies. The 1958–1961 period showed the extent to which even during a regional cold war, alliances could shift, and ideological bipolarity be trumped by the sovereignty norm, highlighting the extent of normative fragmentation even at the peak of the bipolar confrontation (Haas, 2014). In that timeframe, the Egyptian unification with Syria took place and got dissolved and the post-revolutionary Iraqi government of Abd al-Karim Qasim, despite ideological proximity to Nasser’s pan-Arabism, refused Egyptian tutelage and distanced Iraq from Egypt, weakening the resistance front. The cold war label and language resurfaced even before 2011, namely after the 2003 Iraq war and the 2006 Israel-Hizbollah conflict. The 2003 Iraq war caused a split in the Arab League, as Gulf powers tacitly agreed with the US military intervention, leaving only Syria publicly criticizing the attack. Once again, normative fragmentation led to regional dis-unity and to the deepening of regional fractures. In the wake of regime change, US top-down power-sharing agreements led to an enhanced role by Shia political and security forces, which contributed to the sectarian turn of the Iraq civil war after 2006. The role of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Iraqi politics, both on the state level as well as through support of non-state forces has increased threat perceptions across the Sunni Gulf. Similarly, the cross-sectarian regional symbolic and reputational victory by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah against Israel in the 2006 war went well beyond Shia and Lebanese audiences and reverberated across the Arab non-Shia world, thereby exacerbating unease and threat perceptions in the Gulf (Valbjorn & Bank, 2007). The post-2011 revival of the cold war label came to indicate the growing confrontation between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Saudi-centered Sunni block. Similar to the past, it mostly referred to ideology (now interpreted almost exclusively in sectarian terms), focused on the geopolitical bipolar rivalry around areas rendered unstable by years of civil wars (i.e., Syria, Libya, Yemen), and emphasized the zerosum game logic of the contending parties and their allies. However, from a theoretical standpoint, this revival failed to assimilate the insights gathered from post-2003 Iraq and post-2006 Lebanon; without producing concepts able to travel to IR modifying the ways in which “cold wars” are conceptualized, i.e., still embodying a hierarchical

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dialogic modality. The notions of ideological multipolarity (Haas, 2014), normative fragmentation (Barnett, 1998), determining less rigid alliance patterns and more flexible alignment choices have been largely ignored by mainstream political science literature, which thus has maintained, rather than fill, the gap between IR and MES. Since 2011, security-oriented scholarship resurrected the concept of proxy war, employed ubiquitously in the MENA’s theaters of war. The overtly state-centric nature of the classical understanding of proxy war provided half a century ago by Karl Deutsch2 was corrected by incorporating the role of regional powers and a new appraisal of non-state actors, which coincided with a growing attention toward cases from the MENA region, in what could be understood as a partial overture from IR toward a more self-reflexive dialogic turn. To adapt to a changing reality, Mumford (2013) defined proxy war as “indirect engagement in a conflict by third parties wishing to influence its strategic outcome’ through the provision or training of manpower such as co-opted militias or other irregular combatants, the provision of material or money or the sharing or dissemination of information” (p. 1). This forward-looking gaze also identified as features of evolving practices of proxy wars the role of regional powers and (in)formal “proxy coalitions” of both state and nonstate actors (Mumford, 2013, p. 8). These revised notions of proxy wars have been employed, for instance, in post-2011 Syria (Leenders & Giustozzi, 2019; Phillips & Valbjorn, 2018). The role of the multiplicity of identity referents mobilized and acted upon in a military confrontation while empirically demonstrated by MES so far failed to make inroads into broader IR’ rethinking on proxy wars, a testament to the ongoing challenge of generating a truly transformative dialogue. With the post-uprisings’ militarized trajectories in Libya and Syria, reference to a regional cold war has come to imply a broader front where multiple state and non-state actors have penetrated countries outside of their sub-regional complex or even outside of their region. Regional security complex (RSC) theory is another theoretical concept which has featured across Area Studies in the past few decades and has, time and again, partially been revised, without however taking into account suggestions/insights/theorization coming from Area Studies or MES. Regional security complexes are “sets of units whose major processes of securitization, desecuritization or both are so inter-linked that their security problems cannot be reasonably analyzed or resolved apart from one another” (Buzan & Weaver, 2003, pp. 43– 45). The key elements at the basis of any RSC are three sets of dichotomies, in addition to power distribution among actors: anarchy versus integration (polarity), amity versus enmity (relations among units), and securitization versus de-securitization (processes of threat construction). What this approach allows to capture are the ways in which perceptions structure socially constructed relations among regional actors, thereby being at the core of regional order configurations.

2

Karl Deutsch (1964) defined proxy wars as an “international conflict between two foreign powers, fought out on the soil of a third country, disguised as a conflict over an internal issue of that country, and using some of that country’s manpower, resources and territory as a means for achieving preponderantly foreign goals and foreign strategies”(p. 102).

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In the past few years, this approach has been applied to the changing regional geopolitical constellations in the MENA region, with some analytical innovations. On the one hand, the rationalist-realist binary separation between anarchy and integration has been challenged and a third multilayered notion has been proposed, heterarchy. Heterarchy has been recently introduced in IR (Donnelly, 2009, 2016) and had not until lately made incursions into MES. Heterarchy introduces a third ordering principle beyond hierarchy and anarchy, it emphasizes the role of subnational, transnational, and international actors––even in processes of fragmentation of the existing political order––and accepts more blurred lines between the reciprocal influences of the domestic and regional levels. Heterarchical orders refer to systems with multiple and often “tangled” hierarchies. The heterarchic notion of multiple rankings of power relations is useful in the analysis of increasingly hybrid MENA political systems, where rather than weak statehood or multiple governance arrangements, war orders can be conceptualized as heterarchic orders of agencies of coercion whereby stateness is flexible (Leenders & Giustozzi, 2019) but also to regional orders (Hanau Santini, 2017; Hinnebusch, 2018). These applications to the MENA context have on the one hand deepened the previously under-developed IR application notion of heterarchy as a specific regional order premised neither on hierarchy nor anarchy. They have also debunked once for all ill-suited IR accounts of the MENA regional order as essentially anarchic. Moreover, given the high penetration between states and societies in the region and the frequency of domestic concerns impinging on foreign policy choices––what has been termed omnibalancing by Steven David (1991), heterarchy remains an under-utilized concept in MES, but the innovations derived from its empirical usage have far from been incorporated into IR. Whether it is the debate around the Arab Cold War, proxy wars, or Regional Security Complex and its innovations, recent scholarship testifies to a tension between, on the one hand, overcoming the universality-particularity divide, and on the other hand, fully exploiting the potential of cross-fertilization between perspectives. The dialogue between IR and MES scholarship, taking as a standpoint traditional notions of security, can be thus described as self-reflexive, engaging with the limits of each field’s knowledge without yet producing an altogether new understanding as a result of a deeper merge or cross-fertilization of disciplines.

3 Human and Societal Security: Between Theoretical Reflection and Empirical Reality Zooming in more closely on changing theoretical approaches of security and their capacity to testify to changing practices, more than two decades have passed since the concept of human security first emerged and revolutionized the way in which security is thought and practiced. This notion was developed in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War, when it became imperative to broaden security recipients beyond statist

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categories. Analytically disentangling security from the state as sole security referent implied problematizing security and answering to the “security for whom” question. Human security enlarged and deepened notions of security beyond a rigid statecentered, top-down, and military oriented perspective. A people-centered approach allowed to consider new issues and aspects, such as the economic drivers of insecurity as well as environmental ones (Jacoby & Sasley, 2002; Korany, 1986; Korany et al., 1993). Besides human security, societal security conceptualizes security through the lenses of society, deemed to be about collective identity, i.e., the self-conception of community, which, far from being static or reification of individual identity, is processual, fluid, and constructed. Ole Waever refers to fear for the survival of culture, community, nation, and religion as examples of security understandings in terms of identity (Waever, 2008). Societal security, rather than being issue-driven (economic, environmental, physical, etc.) revolves around the sense of identity security for a community, the perception that a specific way of life can be preserved from external threats. A human security-centered perspective helped problematize the concept of the state, mostly in relation to the post-2011 conflicts in Libya, Yemen, Syria as well as Iraq, questioning the prevailing notions of weak, fragile, and failed states. What emerges is a regional perspective that moves beyond a Weberian and Westphalian approach to the state highlighting that “if claims to a monopoly of legitimate violence are challenged and/or violence is exerted by several categories of actors, many of them non-state, the statehood paradigm cannot but appear as a seriously ill patient” (Hanau Santini et al., 2021, p. 2). Attempts at overcoming the state as the main referent to as well as the main agent of security is informed by different theoretical frameworks. Hanau Santini et al. (2021) try to assess the validity of the limited statehood framework in their collection dedicated to the study of the creation of different security orders across the Middle East and Africa. Others examined fragmented and overlapping systems of governance, the permeability and rearticulation of borders, the incidence of transnational movements, and their impact on the state as an analytical category guiding studies in and on the MENA (Clausen, 2018; Costantini, 2018; Doyle & Dunning, 2018; Droz-Vincent, 2018; Hinnebusch, 2018). Other studies, often informed by an anthropological view on the state, have added to the debate by rejecting the state as “an a priori conceptual or empirical object” (Sharma & Gupta, 2006, p. 8) and looking instead at its effects and ways in which the state is imagined by the people (Hermez, 2015; Mouawad & Baumann, 2017). Linked to the above is also the growing attention toward non-state actors in security/insecurity dynamics. Once the rigidities of the state as an analytical object are loosened, the MENA region is exemplary (but not exceptional) in the heterogeneity of non-state actors’ structures, objectives, source of legitimacy, use of violence, and means of financing. Scholars have explored state-like or state-aspiring entities, such as the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, the Southern movement in Yemen, or the Islamic State; armed non-state actors, including pro-government militias; as well as transnationalism (Ahram, 2019; Revkin & Ahram, 2020). Scholarship on non-state actors

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in the MENA region has extensively covered their dual position in governance structures: “non-state actors erode state control and, above all, the monopoly over the legitimate use of violence, but simultaneously fill governance gaps, ranging from service to security provision” (Costantini, 2016, p. 417), pointing to their evolving position in society as well as in international politics. To make sense of the overlapping, at times alternative and at times convergent role of state and non-state actors in governance and in security, scholarship has resorted to the lens of hybridity. Hybridity is neither new––it has been widely discussed in the literature on democracy and development (Roberts, 2013, p. 94) as well as on peace and conflict studies (Boege, 2019; Boege et al., 2009)––nor univocal. Its adoption points to the coexistence of different and competing socio-political orders, which is interpreted as a contextual condition of fluid exchange and contamination. Although the criticism over its analytical fuzziness, complex applicability, and significance, hybridity strikes for its empirical validity whether it is employed to explore armed groups in Libya, Yemen, Syria, Iraq as well as security dynamics beyond these conflict-affected contexts (Ahram, 2020; Ardemagni, et al., 2020; Badi, 2020; Sayigh, 2018). Similar to hybridity, assemblage thinking is mostly descriptive but is gaining attention in critical security studies, both in general and in those applied to the MENA region (Tholens, 2021). Assemblage thinking is premised on a relational ontology and focuses on the making and un-making of complex global process where state, non-state, public, and private actors interact and create new arrangements (Acuto & Curtis, 2014; Savage, 2019). In particular, according to Abrahamsen and Williams (2009), global security assemblages are based upon a constant shift between assembling and reassembling of knowledges and practices. Assemblages include notions of “networked governance”; shifting norms or “mentalities” of security; and increasing salience of risk-based security thinking and technology (p. 3). When these insights are taken into consideration, human security provides for a theoretical contribution that accounts for the shifting security notions and practices at different levels and across actors. Societal security adds to this by incorporating security within a community and considering identity besides other drivers of security/insecurity dynamics. These concepts are essential to orient analyses that treat security in a relational perspective capable of capturing not only the distinction between security arrangements and interpretations (international, state, regime, societal, human, and societal security), but also their relationship. Both perspectives are ways to lay claim to bottom-up understanding of security despite setbacks. Notably, the notion of human security as the concept informing the norm of the Responsibility to Protect declined after it became exposed to the manipulation of international actors pursuing non-humanitarian consideration following its inclusion in the UNSC resolution 1973 (2011) authorizing the NATO-led Operation in Libya (Bellamy & Williams, 2011). The following case studies serve precisely to illustrate empirically how shifting security notions and practices in the contexts of Tunisia and Iraq and their interactions render the security domain in ways that can be hardly explained by traditional concepts and theoretical frameworks.

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4 Ben Guerdane, or the Battle Enabling Shifting Security Notions in Tunisia On March 7, 2016, a group of fifty armed ISIS militants attacked Ben Guerdane, a small southern Tunisian city on the borders with Libya. The assault was warded off by the army and security forces with the support of local residents following a fierce battle. Had the attack been successful, Ben Guerdane would have become the first base of the Islamic Caliphate in Tunisia. This dramatic event was noteworthy as it signaled a new degree of successful cooperation between the various security forces, but also, and more importantly for the paradigmatic changes in security understandings, between security forces and border citizens, traditionally caught between resistance and repression. The active collaboration of local residents defending the town of Ben Guerdane, their community and their way of living against an imminent external threat, embodied changing security practices illustrating changed notions of security. The pre-revolutionary regime security understanding was centered around President Ben Ali, his family and clan, and their interests (Hibou, 2006). Any threat to the survival of the leader and his immediate circle was deemed a national security threat, without however necessarily posing an existential threat to the country itself. Since the 2010/11 uprisings, regime security transformed into state, threatened by terrorist threats in 2013, 2015, and 2016 (Hanau Santini, 2018). At the forefront of this reading of security were territorial integrity, control over terrorist groups’ activities, political neutrality in border countries’ uprisings or conflicts. Since the demise of the regime, the discourse about security shifted toward state security notions of territorial integrity and state sovereignty, especially vis-à-vis the threat coming from Libya and its post-Qaddafi destabilization. With the episode of Ben Guerdane in 2016, the understanding of security further shifted, and its security referents were broadened. The key role of local residents shielding security forces, protecting them, helping them, and contributing to win the battle offered new analytical and symbolic elements enabling the discursive shift from state to societal security. This was particularly relevant as it reversed decades of dismissive and pejorative discourse of southern populations deemed anti-colonial and disloyal to the post-independence statist project (Mullin & Rouabah, 2018; Simoncini, 2021). Defending the city was as much about defending the integrity of the country from the risk of an Islamist takeover, as protecting a community and its way of life. Ben Guerdane had historically been stigmatized as a community thriving thanks to economically illicit practices of cross-border smuggling with Libya and considered a potential hotbed for radicalization and political violence. The flourishing of informal economic activities in culturally, politically, and economically marginal areas was a reaction to the postcolonial political geography of disinvestment and to the nationalist identity spearheaded by the Bourguibist statist project (Bono et al., 2015). These forms of informal political economy were a response to human security needs that were neglected by the central authority, which conveniently depicted the south as a

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secessionist and backward exception to the rest of the country. In the eyes of Tunisbased politicians and national media, the 2016 battle came to symbolize its moral and social redemption. The bravery not just of security forces but of the local population has since then become a standard reference in the public discourse, partially aimed at reshaping the image of previously socially and culturally marginalized local residents now heralded as the symbol of national virtues and merits and symbolizing the ideal type of brave new Tunisians fiercely defending their homeland (Hanau Santini, 2021). The driver for the collective acts of self-sacrifice by local residents was not heroism or ideological proximity with the state or the security forces, but rather the need to preserve their community’s societal security. In several interviews conducted by one of the authors in Ben Guerdane in November 2019 with members of the local community, there was a pointed reference to identity dimensions which went beyond the individual level and encompassed the sense of a community identity and the need to preserve it (“we are not like them, we have nothing to do with terrorists”, “they would have changed how we live”, “they were alien, different from us, also the ones from Ben Guerdane, they came from Libya”). From the side of the community, it was societal security that drove individual and collective responses.

5 Defending What and Whom? The Hashd al-Shaabi in the Iraqi Security Scenario The Hashd al-Shaabi (Popular Mobilization forces) is an umbrella organization grouping together a highly diversified and decentralized group of established and newly created militias, only loosely coordinated within the Popular Mobilisation Commission and responding to different command lines, of a tribal, political, and/or ethnic nature, totaling around 30–50 groups and 150,000 members (Ezzedine et al., 2019; O’Driscoll & Van Zoonen, 2017). The organization, together with other actors, was a response to the expansion of the Islamic State in 2014 and its goals of drawing new state boundaries between Iraq and Syria, articulating new forms of religiously oriented authority, and proposing an altogether alternative model of governance. Since 2017, in the aftermath of the defeat of the Islamic State the group did not demobilize, nor was it integrated into the formal security apparatus and continued to operate according to separate lines of command and structure. More importantly, it undertook independent actions at times contrary to the Iraqi government’s interpretation of national security (Knights et al., 2020), such as the “resistance formation” ( fasa’il al-muqawamma), a group of militias and militiamen with a tight relationship with Iran (in terms of sponsorship as well as of a model of political organization) (Haddad, 2020). If the Hashd al-Shaabi have been fundamental to defend state security at the time of the expansion of the Islamic State, they soon positioned themselves into an ambiguous position in between national security and regime security. In particular,

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the “resistance formation” has upheld an interpretation of security that collapses state security with ethno-sectarian regime security. The complementarity reached by formal and informal security providers that proved successful to react to the IS insurgency since 2014, transformed into a rivalry that sets apart different visions of the state, continuing a trend already evident in the aftermath of the invasion and occupation of the country in 2003 (Costantini, 2018). Based on non-overlapping and at times conflicting notions of state and regime security, the Hashd al-Shaabi also represents an ambiguous actor in a diversified understanding of human and societal security. At the individual level, they add up to existing economic and environmental security challenges preventing a restoration of social cohesion in the country. At the community level, as some non-state armed groups assumed a political dimension either at the national or at the local level, they have become a source of or a threat to security based on differently defined in-group and out-group logics, such as in the governorate of Nineveh. In a localized articulation of the security dilemma, ethno-religious communities’ perceptions of security reliant upon non-state security provision have contributed to maintain a high level of insecurity at the governorate level.

6 Conclusion The case studies of Tunisia and Iraq speak differently to the way in which state, regime, human and societal security-based perspective allows for grasping the differentiated and multilayered articulation of security in space, time, and according to the actors involved. They are evidence of the endogenous security narratives that have been largely marginalized. What they reveal is the disarticulation of security from the state, which in turn, feeds into the literature problematizing security together with the state, non-state actors, and their relations. In all, they testify to the pluralization of the understandings and the practices of security. What security is and means is subject to change throughout time, geographical space, and what is ultimately considered the object of security. The reading and writing of security on the MENA region have been increasingly challenged by accounts from a twofold source. On the one hand by Area Studies’ scholars who have enriched existing understandings of IR notions and concepts by showing how their illustrations adapted to MENA contexts could further challenge and/or enrich them. On the other, from MENA scholars writing from the region on the region, rejecting perceived mainstream Western political science and IR approaches and adopting more localized readings, historically contingent approaches, and expressing positionality driven concerns. This chapter has uncovered some problematic aspects related to how knowledge is produced in, on, and from the MENA region. It illustrated the long-standing Area Studies-IR controversy from the standpoint of MES and the different sources of miscommunication and misunderstandings between the two and perceived neglect by MES of IR, a Godot MES has long been waiting for. With this debate on the

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background and focusing on the theme of security, the chapter explored key IR derived concepts––cold war, proxy war––and theoretical approaches––regional security complex, heterarchy––and has showed the extent to which their application by MES scholars in the past decade to the regional conflict and new patterns in regional order dynamics, beyond enriching understanding of local and regional dynamics, has innovated and partially revised those same IR concepts. At the same time, it has shown the difficulties for these revised approaches to travel back to IR or Security Studies, pointing to the continuing insularity of mainstream political science vis-à-vis Area Studies. On a more positive note for the cross-fertilization between IR and MES, the chapter noted instead that the recent turns in IR revolving around hybridity for political systems, limited statehood, and global assemblages internationally run in parallel with MES’ attention toward reconceptualization of statehood and security. As the case studies show, terrorism and the fight against it in the case of Tunisia and the role of militias in the case of Iraq are inserted in a broader scenario whereby shifting notions of security (temporal, geographical, and actor-based) determine much of the security dynamics in the two countries. The case studies have illustrated how more nuanced and overlapping security understandings can become prevalent, with traditional notions of regime and state security being juxtaposed with new narratives articulated around notions of both human and societal security. The encounter of these two turns in IR and MES is seen as one of great potential to pave the way for an enhanced dialogue between disciplines, which may lead IR to, sooner or later, incorporate some Area Studies’ insights so as to strengthen the more transformative dialogue between the two. The wait for Godot, while still ongoing, might not last forever.

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Regionalisms as a Middle-Path Between Area Studies and IR. A Political Sociology of Central American Regionalism Kevin Parthenay

1 Introduction In the current world order, regional balances of power have become volatile and demand attentions as they gained a curbing influence on IR (Fawcett, 2020: 179). Regional organizations quickly unfold since the end of the 20th and have increased their actorness. In that sense, the early outlines of a shifting global order have been tainted by an increasing regionalization of international phenomena. Though, regions, regionalisms, and regional organizations are constantly put into question as pertinent objects to grab international politics. The difficulties to grasp common ontological and epistemological approximations of the regional phenomena limited the capacity to take those objects into better account. The regional layer remained under the hegemony of mainstream international theories and concepts. Regionalism (or regional integration1 ) and regional cooperation have mainly been scrutinized under the lenses of intergovernmentalism (Mattli, 1999; Moravcsik, 1998), neofunctionalism (Haas, 1958; Schmitter, 1970), and/or institutionalisms (Pollack, 2003; Sweet et al., 2001). For years, those mainstreaming state-centered dimensions undermined knowledge excerpted from deep field immersion, qualitative or inductive methodologies, and context-sensitive studies. In parallel, “regionalists” scholars specialized on a specific region, have 1 We define regionalism as “ideas, ideologies, programmes, policies and goals that seek to transform an identified social space into a regional project” (Bach, 2016: 5). Regional integration rather refers to the historical process of European construction, on the empirical side, and to the idea of sovereignty transfer, on the theoretical one.

The author wants to thank the editors of this volume. K. Parthenay (B) University of Tours, Institut Universitaire de France, Paris, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. D’Amato et al. (eds.), International Relations and Area Studies, Contributions to International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39655-7_5

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been often assimilated to area studies or comparative politics scholars and then put to the periphery of international theoretical debates, constructivists being an exception (Acharya, 2001). However, regionalists have much to say on the current moving configuration of the global order and some of its regional determinants. More than accumulation of monographies, regionalists can bring to the forefront knowledge on regional practices, interpersonal networks, ideas, and heterogeneous perceptions of the global order that helps bringing more substance to the interplay between those regional layers and global politics. But to do so a specific analytical and methodological toolkit is required. How should the regionalisms be studied to be captured as a middle-path between International Relations (IR) and Area Studies (AS)? After thirty years of relative isolation, the debate that opposes International Relations theories and Area Studies that has recently gained renewed momentum as the international order is shifting and as a “decentered IR agenda” (Non-Western, PostWestern, Post-Colonial, Global IR studies) is consolidating. Regionalists can actively take profit of that. Indeed, we argue that regions, regionalisms, and regional organizations (ROs) are useful and meaningful objects of social science to mix IR theories and area-knowledge-based approaches. In that chapter, I propose to take stock of the existing literature that has covered regionalism and draw on this analytical and methodological ground a middle-path through a political sociology. This middlepath will be applied to a specific world region, Latin America, and to a narrower exploration of the Central American regionalism. The chapter will be organized as follow. Section 2 gets back on how International Relations and studies of regionalisms have been connected. Taking stock of that literature, the following Sect. 3 identifies the limits and hurdles of the literature on Latin American regionalism in order to justify, in Sect. 4, the development of an analytical and methodological proposal, based on political sociology (public administration, actors, practices), meaningful for a broader connection between regional and international realities. The fifth section unfolds an empirical exploration of Central American regionalism and the final section concludes by outlining avenues for future research.

2 International Relations and the Study of Regionalisms: A Short History2 The study of regionalisms has traditionally been associated to the advancements of IR theories and debates. However, it has unfolded isolated and has mostly been discarded when to understand international politics and/or global phenomena. This is mostly due to a fuzzy, heterogeneous, and constantly changing definition of what are regions and how regionalisms are shaped (Van Langenhove, 2003). Classical theories of regional integration appeared uncontroversially after World War II, with an institutional support in the UN Charter, and concerned mostly 2

For more details, see Parthenay, K. (2019). A political sociology of regionalisms. perspectives for a comparison, Chap. 2. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Western Europe. Those theories started from a rationalist logic of action, as they aimed at understanding how regional cooperation helped to avoid wars and/or foster peace. Those realist theories were predominantly state-centered. Federalism, functionalism, neofunctionalism, and intergovernmentalism have been traditionally presented as the common ground of those “classical regional integration theories”. Functionalists underlined that the regional institutional model was an emanation of the function played at the international level ( form follows function). However, the predominant focus on functions gave birth to a series of criticisms: theoretical normativity; the downplaying of politics; and a lack of sociological consideration beyond the technocratic dimension of regional cooperation. Those weaknesses opened an avenue for theoretical refinements. Neo-functionalists postulated that regional cooperation would spread from low politics (economy) to high politics (security; Haas, 1958), inter-governmentalists argued that regional cooperation was mainly guided by national interests (Hoffmann, 1966). However, the European sclerosis of the 1970s weakened the neo-functionalists’ theories and gave reasons to the inter-governmentalists. At the same time, an increasing number of regional experiences as well as changing regional realities was to underline in Africa and Asia, and to a slightly lesser extent in Latin America. The number of ROs developed quite significantly as an extension of the decolonization period. That implied institutional adjustments (Dabène, 2009). Owing to the development of regional experience beyond Europe, the theoretical efforts shifted away from neo-classical arguments and Eurocentric theories. Contrary to previous theorization, the global extension of the regional agenda gives more space to political dimensions and opens doors to comparisons. Axline (1977) called rather to focus on aspects that refer more concretely to the proper goals of the respective regionalisms, considering their singularities, and give importance to the relationships between economics and politics, and to the economic and political conditions that may determine the fate of regionalism from a national perspective. In that sense, Axline sets the basis of an international political economy approach to regionalism that will unfold later and more closely to the new regionalism phase. The focus on political factors and non-territorial logics, through an incipient focus on global regionalizing patterns of interactions, shaped the elements that inspired the following wave. This “new regionalism” period experienced a large degree of theoretical progress, but with an intense fragmentation of the field. It coincided with an ongoing reflection on the retreat of states (Strange, 1996), referred to the spectacular increase in regional agreements in the early 1990s and grasped regionalism as a “neat pattern of global subsidiarity” (Fawcett & Hurrell, 1995: 324). Therefore, regionalism was mainly considered as “driven” and not as a “driving force”, and external factors—oriented toward trade and security—were key to explain its development. The NRA scholars defined regionalism as a “multidimensional form of integration which includes economic, political, social and cultural aspects and thus goes far beyond the goal of creating region-based free trade regimes or security alliances” (Hettne et al., 1999: xvi). It helped differentiate between a state-centric and a pluralist approach to regionalism (old versus new).

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The curbing number of actors and the reconfiguration of power determinants, since the end of the Cold War, contributed to open new international debates, in particular rationalism versus reflectivism. While rationalists focused more on the assessment of governance or institutional performance (Koremenos et al., 2001), reflectivists focused more on the purpose of regionalism and how regions are shaped (Acharya, 2001; Bach, 2016; Katzenstein, 2005). In consequence of the constructivist turn, ideas and identities draw an increasing attention in international as well as regional matters. In that perspective, some argued that regions had to be rather considered as social and political spaces, plagued by constant redefinitions or reinterpretations (Hameiri, 2013). However, very few scholars specialized on extra-European regionalisms have explored more in detail the social power relations beyond institutional embodiments and formal ROs (Nair, 2019; Prieto, 2003).

3 Limits and Hurdles from the Study of Latin American Regionalisms Those theoretical developments have paced the studies on Latin American regionalisms, and reproduced weaknesses and hindrances to consider regionalisms as area-based international phenomena.

3.1 The Limits of Latin American (LA) Regionalism Studies Studies on LA regionalisms have followed different historical waves of regional cooperation in the continent since early experiments of the end of the 1940s. The first scholarship sought to apply the concepts and hypotheses used for the European case. Haas and Schmitter were among the first to try to generalize the neofunctionalist theory to LA experiments (Haas & Schmitter, 1964). While states were considered as central to launch the regional integration, they argued that they were becoming progressively less influential and let spaces for supranational organizations and political groupings. A debate ensued on the automaticity of this process, some refuting it and favoring the primacy of states over the spill-over logic (Cochrane, 1969; Nye, 1965). At that time, the literature focuses mainly on Central American (Common Market of Central America, Organization of Central American States) or trade-oriented schemes of integration (LAFTA). Afterward, the intergovernmentalist approach has dominated, considering LA regionalisms as the outcome of negotiations between national governments (Nye, 1971), and giving importance to “national political arenas” (Wynia, 1970). The second generation of theories unfolded when LA regionalisms reactivated in the 1990s. New or reformed regional project appeared: Common Market of the South (1991), Central American Integration System (1991), Andean Community of Nations

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(1996). That dynamic was interpreted as embedded in a global context that sees the spreading of neoliberal principles and in which vulnerable or weak states are trying to deal with economic threats. In Latin America, regionalisms are then considered as a lever for international economic insertion. Some institutionalists have completed that scheme, however, paying attention to the link with the consolidating democracies and then to the organizational structures emerging from the new regional agreements (Bouzas & Soltz, 2001; Dabène, 1997). Still, as States were remaining the key players, the “demand for integration” was the main explanation for how regionalisms emerge and change. In that context, presidential diplomacy or “inter-presidentialism” was the predominant factor (Dabène, 1997; Malamud, 2003). Those interpretations have confronted however with a changing pattern in IR, with the proliferation of non-state actors on the global stage. The International Political Economy (IPE) and New Regionalisms approaches (NRA) helped insert new actors in the analysis. The IPE framework considers not only the struggles between domestic actors that shape foreign policies, but also the interaction between non-state actors, in particular business groups, that interact in an independent way from governments (Tussie, 2009; Tussie & Trucco, 2010: 38). Although the IPE approach widens the spectrum of actors under study, it remains mainly responsive to external threats such as globalization or liberalization and considers that regionalism is driven from above “being always formal and institutional” (Vivares & Herrera-Vinelli, 2020: 18). The NRA promoted the inclusion in the analysis of a wider spectrum of actors, private and public actors at multiple levels (national, regional, international). In line with this, ideas and collective identities have become more important to understand why states orientate toward regional cooperation or how regional norms are shaped (Duina, 2006, Prieto, 2003, Puntigliano & BriceñoRuiz, 2013, 2020). Scarcely applied, constructivist studies suffer from understanding LA regionalisms from above. Agency has essentially targeted governments and states and did not deconstruct the regional bodies that are non-unitary organizations. In addition, constructivists have not been able to respond or provide analytical elements to understand the evolutions of LA regionalisms, whose debate has been dichotomized: “complexification-transformation” (Tussie & Riggirozzi, 2012) versus “termination-exhaustion” (Malamud & Gardini, 2012). At the end of the 2000s, some preferred to focus on regional policy-making processes, predominantly under the concept of “regional governance”. This approach proposes an actor-based approach and interactive frameworks to understand how a variety of actors interact independently (Hoffmann, 2019). This has mainly led to the multiplication of sector-based analyses: on health governance (Agostinis & Parthenay, 2020; Belén Herrero & Tussie, 2015; Buss & Tobar, 2018; Riggirozzi, 2014), infrastructures (Palestini & Agostinis, 2018), and security (Villa et al., 2019; Weiffen & Villa, 2017). Nevertheless, the focus remained on the formal institutional side, or the formal interaction patterns, without exploring their sociological roots and dynamics. To sum up this non-exhaustive panorama of the (prolific) Latin American regionalisms studies, we identify several limits: a difficulty to step away from state-centrism; a systematic focus on the instrumental dimension of the regionalisms (economic

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growth, security, peace, global insertion, autonomy, etc.); an underestimation of regional actors (organizations, and officials) and their capacity to act independently and autonomously (since neofunctionalism was set aside). Those elements invite to explore regionalisms differently.

3.2 The Hurdles of Latin American Regionalism Studies: The Regional Organizations Problem Since the end of WWII, the number of ROs have increased intensely as well as their scope. Latin America is no exception. Notwithstanding this, all the attention has been focused on the “N” dimension, in other words the formal side of those organizations (organizational bodies), and not on the “Q” dimension, that is to say the “qualitative dimensions”. Both practical and political reasons related to the field research process explain that neglect. First, when working on regionalism, the fieldwork locates mainly between member states administrations and the headquarters of ROs. Regarding the latter, data accessibility is most often the major obstacle and explains why we have little information on the sociological dimension of ROs. In addition, as they have been relegated to the second rank of analysis as “subalterns” to member states, scarce information is divulgated. Transparency can also be an issue, because of both state control and/or certain dysfunctions of the system itself. Therefore, the useful empirical material for a political sociologist is then rarely accessible through official materials (statements, communiqués, other legal documents) which are only cleaned-up results of empirical substratum that is much more meaningful. On a political side, the repeated regional crises (Parthenay, 2020; Weiffen & Nolte, 2021), generating organizational stop-and-go, complicate research processes where we observe decouplings between political dynamics and bureaucratic processes, gaps between political crisis and administrative continuity in the implementation of public policies. This reality often forces us to go beneath the surface and differentiate between the formal and the informal. Those observations invite to go beneath the surface of legal and institutional (de jure) understanding of regionalisms. When the legal foundations and institutional formalizations are unreliable to explain political phenomena, it is necessary to give centrality to de facto power balances, to interactions, and therefore to know much more about who runs the ROs. The social characteristics of individuals (their trajectories and capitals, which influence their behaviors and perceptions) are as central as the structure in which they evolve is uncertain. Here, state-centric and institutionalists perspectives (the rationalist one) prove to be insufficient to account for regionalisms, considered as increasingly complex social phenomena. These are the challenges to connect regional realities with international relation analyses.

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4 A Political Sociology of Regionalisms: A Framework How a political sociological approach to regionalisms constitutes a middle-way between Area Studies and IR? This approach originated in an area-based research in Central America. Our main idea is that an inner-knowledge, in-depth analysis is necessary to capture the reality of regional dynamics and prevent interpretation gaps (between de jure and de facto dynamics). This approach calls for an inductive grounded methodology to elaborate qualitative and contextualized empirical findings. More specifically, this approach requires to spend time within the ROs, not only to gain trust and accessibility, but to understand how individuals are led to think the way they do, how they appropriate recurring local realities, how these appropriations are carried out (by what mechanisms), and how these elements have an impact on the way they behave, most often in a differentiated manner (in relation to the Member States, in relation to their hierarchical supervision or in relation to external actors), and operate within the ROs. These elements of knowledge are only acquired through time spent in the “regional milieu”, but it is not only about time, it is also about more general knowledge about the regional area: long-term historically shaped power balances between actors, diplomatic practices or routines, and determinants of political cultures. This is the point where area studies and IR debates can connect. The PSR advances a set of analytical tools or focal points to investigate regionalisms. It offers also a flexible and adaptative methodological toolkit. As there is still little knowledge about specific elements—such as budget procedures, emergence of regional professions, and personal networks—PSR tries to apply three interrelated avenues of inquiry to regionalisms: regional administration, agents, and practices. This approach opens a perspective on the relationship between institutional structures, agents, and practices, and as such, provides tools to push further comparative studies of regionalisms in the Global South more generally. The PSR approach follows two main purposes: first, it develops a comprehensive approach of regionalisms, a phenomena that have spread across the globe; second, it allows context-sensitive generalizations promoting new paths for cross-regional comparisons. The generalization ambition is made since local and area-based knowledge rather than on hypothetico-deductive process (in quest of lawful regularities). The PSR approach ambitions to locate at the crossroad of area studies/international relations debate as it offers answers to different but common expectations. To be more explicit, it helps to understand some trends at stake and dynamics of the global order transformation (IR perspective), and to understand the structuration of regional areas crossed by transnational or external dynamics and their implications on political cultures and power configurations (AS perspective). The political sociology approach of regionalisms locates midway. The research framework implies three areas, each requiring a back and forth between formal dimensions (de jure) and actor’s behaviors, strategies, and perceptions (de facto). The articulation between the three areas does not follow a rigid and systematic scheme implying an order or hierarchy, nevertheless the variety of their interrelations opens rich analytical perspectives (for instance, non-compliance or

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implementation gaps associated with individual entrepreneurship opens perspectives for organizational autonomy). The first area focuses on regional public administrations (RPA), through an examination of institutional design and formal rules (with a mapping strategy). The main objective is to unpack formal institutionalism and deconstruct decision-making processes, their procedures, and norms as well as how these are interpreted and implemented (and by who). But to unpack and deconstruct, it is necessary to first account for the official architecture of a RO. What are the rules in vigor? What are its missions? What are the competences delegated to regional staffs? What degree of autonomy from the member states? Here, the formal ways to do things, in particular to elaborate the budgets, to recruit staff, to define the decision-making channels, etc., are central aspects for the regional public administration perspective. Once outlined the contours of the organization and the modes of operation, it becomes possible to identify discontinuities, unanticipated behaviors, decisions, or institutional ambiguity. The gaps between this de jure and de facto operation of ROs can result from both non-compliance or complexity of rules, their conflicting or divergent interpretations, and actors’ bounded rationality when elaborating and applying them (Chayes & Chayes, 1996). Institutional ambiguity arises from all that is implicit of an institution (historical legacies, interpersonal logics, informality, and subjectivity) (Mahoney & Thelen, 2010). This gap between the formal (what was legally intended) and the actual functioning of the organization opens up several interesting analytical perspectives: it allows us to explore the way in which certain actors within organizations deviate from the formal pathways and gain autonomy (individual actor scale); it allows us to explore the way in which certain organizations gain autonomy and, more broadly, international authority (Hooghe et al., 2017); it implies in all cases to immerse oneself in the existing practices within the organizations in order to better grasp the articulations between the diversity of actors circulating in the regional sphere (member state, regional public actors, national and/or regional non-state actors). In a blurry and uncertain organizational context, understanding the behavior and ways of thinking of the actors is paramount. This second area refers to a sociology of the actors that circulate in the regional sphere. It aims at fleshing out ROs and their institutionalization processes. To the date, this scholarship has been exclusively applied to the European case (Georgakakis, 2012; Mérand, 2021; Joana & Smith, 2002). The objective is to understand interaction patterns and power configurations through the light of individuals’ characteristics (biographical and professional background). Individuals enter an organization or any professional milieu with a background (education and professional). This background influences the way things are perceived and understood, the way the individual related to the group, and the way the role will be performed (in a Goffmanian perspective). The sociology of regional actors can both explain why and how actors comply with existing rules or deviate and foster gaps between rules and practices. It also helps explore the emergence of regional “professionals” through the development of “regional occupational groups” (here in a Weberian perspective) (transnational technocracy versus state-centered political powers). The outlines of this “occupational group” are set by the aggregation of regional staff characteristics. In the end, we investigate the evolution at

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the regional level of the skills, competences, and attributes required in order to hold positions. The third area refers to the study of regional practices (that are intimately related to social characteristics of regional actors). Practices generally refer to “ways of doing things” (Neumann, 2002), recognized and recognizable by a set of actors in a given “milieu” resulting from symbolic struggles and shaping orders of interaction (Pouliot, 2017; 2018). The study of practices borrows doubly from Goffman and Bourdieu insofar as it considers, firstly, that practices unfold on a stage where roles are codified according to a constituted order of interaction (Goffman’s dramaturgical metaphor), and secondly, that individuals do not engage untouched in these interactions and struggle to position themselves in a social space characterized by relational competition effects (Bourdieu’s field theory). This combination of sociological argumentation has helped to rethink multilateral diplomacy, some international organizations such as the UN or NATO (Ambrosetti, 2009; Pouliot, 2010), but to a much lesser extent ROs. A trend is emerging, however, with applications of this sociological framework to South-East Asian regionalism, notably ASEAN (Nair, 2019). The observation is that ROs, like IOs, can indeed be thought of as specific orders of interaction. While orders of interaction are reconstructed from the practices, it is possible to observe continuities and discontinuities, in the respect of formal rules for instance. What is interesting to extract from the observation of this “practical sense”, which establishes the hierarchical orders and the resources of legitimation, is also the “misconducts” that are either volunteers (by subversion) or not (by incompetence) (Pouliot, 2017; 2018). Those “missed performance” (in the sense of Goffman, 1961), reveals even more clearly what is expected and accepted in the regionalisms and what is not. In return, this sheds light on how are shaped the outlines of the regional rules, hierarchal orders, and how these are legitimated. Those three interrelated areas of inquiry help connecting scattered bodies of sociological literature to study international phenomena (autonomy, authority, international status groups, etc.) and unpacking regionalisms, and more particularly ROs as observation platforms.

5 A Political Sociology of Central American Regionalism In this section, I elaborate on the Central American regionalism on the basis of the above-presented analytical and methodological framework.3 The section is organized according to the three areas of inquiry presented above.

3

All the data used in this section comes from a monograph on the Central American regionalism, Parthenay K. (2013). L’intégration régionale en Amérique centrale. Une sociologie politique du changement (1991–2012). Sciences Po, Paris.

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5.1 Regional Public Administration (RPA) Analysis The study of RPA focuses on institutional design and formal rules and aims at unpacking the official and formal architecture to account for de facto operations and decision-making processes. The Central American Integration System (CAIS) is a helpful case-study to illustrate the contribution of an RPA analysis. Indeed, CAIS is a case that shed light on this mismatch between de jure and de facto dimensions. An institutionalist perspective may even obscure the understanding of the Central American regionalism. The literature says that SICA is a state-centered case of regionalism and has mostly been studied under intergovernmentalist approach (Caldentey del Pozo, 2004; Sanchez, 2009). The founding treaties carry this political nature of a system centered on and dependent exclusively on the will of the states. However, a strict focus on formal institutionalism is likely to obscure the understanding of regional realities. SICA is illustrative of such a risk. For instance, an institutional examination of the SICA’s decision-making process leads to consider a core regional body: the Executive Committee (EC-SICA) over the period 1993–2010 (Hooghe et al., 2017). Despite its creation by the Tegucigalpa Protocol’s in 1991, this committee has only been put in place and activated in 2011. Since then, this body composed with low-ranking national representatives has not been in capacity to fulfill yet its foundational mission that is to elaborate sectorial regional public policies (art. 24, Tegucigalpa Protocol). This lack of organizational normalization created blockages, ambiguities, and necessary adjustments to compensate for the institutional vacuum. The Councils of Ministers have assumed most of the competences related to the elaboration of sectoral policies and the whole system has long remained in great legal uncertainty due to the lack of validation of the internal regulations. In the same perspective, a strict focus on the formal institutional underlines that within SICA “core funding continues to be drawn from member states contribution” (Hooghe et al., 2017: 419). In practice, the regional governance model lays on an opposite reality. The SICA, and its General Secretariat, rely mostly on external funding, notably through the exacerbation since 2004 of a project-based operating policy. Member states budgetary participation (cuotas) is minimal and irregular (with arrears) (CFR-SICA 2018). The General Secretariat operates with $2,3 millions given by states ($300.000/state, except $200.000 for Belize) although it surrounds $3 millions of expenses (CFR-SICA 2018). Some sectorial bodies operate with 90% of its budget financed by external actors, for instance, the Executive Secretariat of COMISCA (SE-COMISCA) (Agostinis & Parthenay, 2021). Others, like the Central American Development Commission (CCAD), operate with 90% of its staff financed by international projects. An estimation of SICA’s total budget (about $12 millions) indicates that nearly half of it ($5 millions) comes directly from external actors (states or non-states donors). In Central America, the necessity to go beyond formal institutionalism extends those organizational and financial matters. It is also linked to a normative inflation and uncertainty. SICA’s normative inflation, in a context of weak organizations, gave birth to a blurred regional legal order. In 2013, at least 12 different types of rules had

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been created since 1991 (agreements, declarations, resolutions, agreements, amendments, regulations, memorandum, conventions, protocols, treaties, etc.) (Parthenay, 2013). This fostered legal instability and uncertainty as the normative hierarchy was unclearly defined. For instance, SICA’s legal foundation bears the name of “Protocol”, while its legal nature is that of a treaty. Originally, Honduras proposed to revive regional integration with a “Constitutive Treaty of the Central American Integration System”. However, the likelihood of an opposition from the Costa Rican Congress prompted the negotiators, and Nicaraguans in particular, to promote a strategy of legal circumvention. Indeed, as the ex-Secretary General Mauricio Herdocia explains the idea of proposing legally a “Protocol” rather than a “Treaty” was a strategic and political decision intending to circumvent the potential Costa Rican blockade that has a rather anti-integrationist diplomatic stand. The birth of SICA was therefore part of a dynamic in which the political logic was superimposed on the legal order, placing the system in a legal uncertainty. These initial political strategies have consequences in the present as they complicate reform initiatives. Today, no State is taking the risk of a major reform of the Protocol that would require a new “treaty” and expose the system to states’ veto and a subsequent collapse of SICA. This unprecise regional legal order explains the 129 legal recourses (in litigation or consultation) between 1994 and 2010 in the Central American Court of Justice (CCJ).

5.2 Regional Actors Agency matters in ROs. Regionalisms are institutional spaces in which agents circulate and with them social capitals circulate too. To perform at the regional scale, mastering some skills, knowledge, and know-how is needed. Previous research carried out on the Executive and General Secretaries of SICA (corresponding to the status of senior regional civil servant, sample of 20 individuals over the period 1991–2012) (Parthenay, 2013), shed light on an ongoing technocratization trend of civil servants granting them some forms of bureaucratic autonomy, and sometimes power, thanks to a diversity of accumulated capitals (in the sense of Bourdieu). Here, we do not directly present this phenomenon of technocratization, which would require more consequent developments, but focus on one insightful dimension to illustrate how regional agency matters: the diversity of socialization dynamics, and in particular the centrality of international socialization. This exploration of regional agent’s socio-biographic trajectories provides information on both SICA’s operation modes (ROs as international actors) linked to specific features of the Central American region (area studies). We examine international socialization through a double anchorage: university education and professional trajectory. Regarding university education, we notice that most of the senior regional officials have completed their tertiary studies abroad. This is mainly due to both the weakness of university system in the region and the lack of the professionalization of the Central American civil service (Longo, 2008). Those two features have made of foreign universities the most attractive option for generations of Central American

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students from the upper social classes. In that perspective, the United States, Canada, and a few European countries (France and Spain) have attracted the majority of our sample of senior officials. Three observations stand out: the university degree does not correspond to a national marker as it is for instance in the European case; the absence of a recurrent or systematized pathway to the regional (and national) civil service; the early international socialization of regional senior officials. These early socializations are not neutral when it comes to considering the practices developed in the professional context. Indeed, it is noteworthy to observe that the university education of environmental secretaries (SE-CCAD) is predominantly a European one and that this SICA’s policy domain is largely driven by the European cooperation. In the same perspective, it is noteworthy that the general secretaries of economic integration (SG-SIECA4 ) have been mainly trained in North American universities. Between Harvard, Yale, the MIT, and Stanford, a great majority of SG-SIECAs, one exception being Ernesto Torres (2011–2013), were trained in the principles of international economics in the United States, the region’s first historical economic partner. It should be noted that Central America has been under the pressure of sharp economic liberal reforms in the early 1990s through structural adjustment programs promoted by Washington. These socializations to the precepts of the neoliberal economy are also levers of influence for the successful application, from the regional level, of the liberal reforms promoted by the United States (Bulmer-Thomas, 2010). Regarding the professional trajectory, although the group of regional secretaries is too heterogeneous to conceptualize a regular path to a “Central American career”, the accumulation of international professional experiences is central. Socialization in international or regional negotiation practices, codes, and techniques, as well as to the problems and stakes of neighboring states are decisive to occupy regional positions. We note the importance for all of them of occupying a high-level national or international position that familiarizes them with the codes and practices of intergovernmental negotiations (via the functions of sectoral minister or advisor to the presidency or director of units within the Ministries of Foreign Relations (MRE)). Thus, occupying a (executive or general) secretary position implies having acquired the skills and know-how specific to diplomatic activity, its language and its protocolary proceedings. In this respect, we note that a broad sociability and a certain familiarity with intergovernmental practices are particularly decisive comparative advantages when it comes to occupying those positions. Several of SICA’s Secretaries General have also served as national representatives to multilateral organizations, such as Roberto Herrera (1993–1997) to the former European Economic Community (EEC) and to the United Nations, Haroldo Rodas (SG-SIECA 1995–2008) to the GATT, and Marco Antonio Gonzales (SE-CCAD 2004–2008) to the International Labor Organization (ILO). In comparison, since the end of the 2000s and the increasing number of regional officials (mostly due to massive European funding programs), SICA’s sociology changed and so did the social capitals associate with regional positions.5 From 4 5

Sistema de la Integración Económica Centroamericana (SIECA). All the data for this paragraph is taken from Parthenay (2013).

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“internationalized sector specialists”, we see the emergence of “regional technocrats” whose profile or actions do not or no longer necessarily correspond to the contours of the rules defined to supervise the regional staff of SICA. Resulting mainly from a specialization on regional affairs, an extension of “regional careers”, senior regional officials become more likely to intervene in the policy-making process. First, we notice an increase in professional experience related to the Central American region, both private and public. The careers of the secretaries have shown that more and more specific Central American institutional capital is accumulated before accessing the position. All of them, through national or regional socialization, have accumulated skills and know-how specific to the functioning of Central American integration. Moreover, it is significant to identify an extension of careers’ length within SICA, among secretaries but also among regional officials. Beyond the longevity in the institution, we see the emergence of “career paths” with a progressive ascent in the hierarchy of the organization. Therefore, the individuals who assume responsible functions within SICA have previously accumulated a specific capital that can be summarized as negotiation skills, mastery of the Central American institutional framework (organizational functioning and legal norms), and mastery of the articulation between levels of public action. It is a dynamic of specialization and differentiation of regional agents that is thus at stake. In that sense, regional agents, and not only secretaries, constitute increasingly a “status group” in the Weberian sense of the term, establishing an increasingly marked boundary between “insiders” and “outsiders” (Parthenay, 2013: 391). More than simple epistemic communities articulated around expert knowledge, we observe that (social and cultural) capitals that circulate within that “regional professional space” are not stable and evolve across time according to how the position of the region evolves itself (US dominance, dialogues with Europe, etc.). The sociobiographical trajectories of the individuals thus tell us a great deal about the way the organization functions, both in terms of the way in which it relates to external influences (EU, United States), the way in which practices and ideas circulate internationally, and the way in which the RO itself evolves through the strengthening of capitals and skills specific to the exercise of regional functions. Such evolutions are decisive to understand ROs’ actorness in period of crises (compensating states’ defiencies), as it has been the case with SICA during the Covid-19 pandemic (Parthenay, 2021).

5.3 Regional Practices From the risks induced by formal institutionalist approach through, namely implementation gaps fed by uncertainty and/or ambiguity, centrality is granted to regional practices. Practices help understanding with more detail how ROs perform. “Practices” are considered here as “ways of doing things that are both socially organized and meaningful” (Pouliot, 2017: 35). In fact, any actors’ interaction implies that the participants apply rules that they have come to know and respect in practice. These rules are often the product of long historical processes built by trials and errors. These

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rules delimit the space of the competition, the field of possibilities, the opportunity zone, and the roles’ outlines for each participant (Goffman, 1973). However, if the rules delineate a particularly binding set of prescriptions, it is essential to observe how participants put them into practice. Indeed, practices may differ widely from the formal rules or assert routines in regulation voids. For instance, conflict or divergence avoidance has become a diplomatic practice within SICA as well as “budget secrecy” (Parthenay, 2013). In Central America, the practice of conflict avoidance has gradually been asserted as a constant diplomatic practice, particularly within the framework of presidential summits, the supreme political body of SICA. Either the Council of Ministers for External Relations or the technical and sectoral meetings (composed by ministerial representatives and regional officials) that preceded the summits have the main objective of elaborating official documents or statements which rules out any point which may lead to tensions between the member states. This divergence avoidance practice constitutes a key element to understand the weak political dimension of Central American cooperation, the regular criticism of the lack of political will, and the frequent inertia of the regional project. What is interesting here, however, is to understand the source of this practice. This desire to avoid conflict stems from an observation concerning the lack of exemplarity of the states in the system. Making a state the target of criticism or denunciation, even if it is one of the cardinal values of the system such as democracy, is prohibited insofar as the stigmatization exercise could very quickly turn against the stigmatizing state. The Central American states enjoy uneven economic and social development but also variable democratic consolidation. Episodes of democratic degradation are recurrent despite elections and electoral alternations. In the absence of exemplary political-institutional and democratic practices, there is a need to be cautious about the political instability of the region’s states. While this practice, which is recognized by all, does not prevent diplomatic exchanges that are sometimes heated or oppositions on principles or agreements, it targets political judgments on SICA member states. However, this can create obstacles and even deprive the RO of one of its core missions (and contravene the founding treaties, in this case “protocols”) when moments of crisis arise. This was symptomatic of the Nicaraguan political crisis that began in April 2018. The explosion of this crisis came at the same time as the country was faced with the task of proposing a Nicaraguan Secretary General to SICA. As a senior SG-SICA official pointed out, “no one is going to come out against Nicaragua because everyone has something to blame potentially” (interview, SGSICA’s Cabinet, San Salvador, 31 July 20216 ). To the sanction regimes, or political denunciations, the path taken was that of institutional stalemate and progressive paralysis. In interviews conducted within the institution in the early 2010s, similar comments were made regarding the use of SICA funds, as well as those from international cooperation. Although dysfunctions and irregularities were noted, the choice of a blame avoidance strategy maintains the system in inertia and the reproduction of poor institutional performance.

6

An interview made by Zoom, during Covid-19 pandemic. Anonymity asked.

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The issue of budgets is broader and relates to other practices. This occurs to be the case within SICA regarding the budgetary issues. As information is disseminated sparingly within SICA, it often holds a strategic dimension. This finding on that budgetary issue was partly due to a transgression I involuntarily made during the fieldwork. At the end of a conference,7 I gave at the Institute of Specialized Education for Diplomatic Training of El Salvador (IEESFORD), several SICA officials asked about some SICA’s budgetary data I used for the presentation. Those had been extracted from the Secretary General’s 2011 activity report presented at the PARLACEN’s Plenary Assembly, and communicated by a member of this same Parliament. The Salvadoran representatives in the room therefore called out to me, surprised to see included some budgetary information about the General Secretariat’s activities. Following this episode, I understood that there was not a single “official budget” for the General Secretariat but two: one including member states contributions (and other assets), and another adding contributions from international cooperation. These two budgets make it possible to develop differentiated communication strategies. The first one targets only the member states, the second aims at accounting for the international funds implementations. The explanation of those two official budgets lies in other a main feature of the political culture of Central American states: the capture of external funds. As small states and belonging to the categories of “low-income states”, the Central American states (except for Costa Rica and Panama) receive major support from international donors. However, this support coincides with recurrent irregularities in their management due to institutional weaknesses of the state. Not including international cooperation, regional institutions avoid being held to account for the use of these funds and seeing states seek to plunder these external resources. Indeed, I regularly interview regional officials that have complained about the attitude of Ministers who tend to consider regional institutions as “banks” and therefore seek funds, who air tickets, who vehicles, etc. Budgetary data are then strategically used. That is why my presentation was a “transgression” to a regional practice.

6 Concluding Remarks The exploration of the Central American case was an empirical way to illustrate the opportunity to identify connections between area-based phenomena and international or global ones through the study of regionalism. Thanks to the analysis of RPA, actors, and practices, we can better grasped how regionalisms are performed and operate. Taking stock of a dense academic literature on the study of regionalisms (in connection with IR debates and Latin American developments), the political sociology approach enables to bridge some theoretical and empirical gaps, in particular 7

This coincides with Nair’s broader critique around the importance of ethnography and “hanging out” for uncovering practice suggests that that these kinds of practices cannot be discerned from (limited) interviewing with officials (Nair, 2019).

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the difficulty to step away from state-centrism, the systematic focus on the instrumental dimension of the regionalisms (economic growth, security, peace, global insertion, autonomy, etc.), and the underestimation of regional actors (organizations, and officials) and their capacity to act independently and autonomously. Several contributions are particularly valuable. First, it contributes to unravel dark corners of international relations and invisible perspectives within ROs’ studies. Second, it offers a comprehensive understanding of how regionalisms perform, are shaped, and under what conditions they can evolve. Third, it helps conciliating what is traditionally considered as local-based knowledge (political culture features and macro-social characteristics) to international relation debates (shifting global order, with increasing regional actorness). Bridging two antagonistic research traditions—disciplinary-oriented and regionally oriented—the political sociology approach outlines avenues for future research, in line with the comparative area studies perspective (Ahram et al., 2018). In fact, so regionalisms can be meaningful to global analyses, comparison is key. In that perspective, cross-regional comparisons are key to outline this future research agenda, considering regionalisms from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. We call for comparative research processes that are built from the ground and not from pre-conceptualized analytical ambitions. Contextualized cross-regional comparisons will help fostering concept portability and the eventuality of generalizations and embody the empirical reality by giving an account of the socio-historical contexts in which the events or phenomena observed are embedded. Therefore, new light can be shed on the moving complex interaction patterns between states and regional organizations, through cross-regional comparative examinations of RPAs, actors’ social characteristics and zooming in diplomatic practices. This research agenda will serve to inform and extend IR debates, in particular the incipient conceptualizations on the ongoing reconfiguration of the global order.

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Connecting the Local and the Global: International Practice Theory as a Trading Zone for International Relations and Area Studies Scholars Chiara De Franco

Abstract International Practice Theory (IPT) has established a new paradigm that puts practitioners’ quotidian doings front and centre of International Relations (IR) theorising. It is proving to be an influential development also for Area Studies (AS) that share much of IR’s scholarship and objects of study. This is certainly the case for European Studies (ES) as the works of IPT scholars have raised attention to situated, mundane and everyday practices of EU institutions. This chapter reviews the contribution of IPT scholars to ES to assess the added value of this research agenda and its potential to become a “trading zone” where IR and AS scholars can advance their understanding of how the local and the global connect. It also identifies two challenges that have not been adequately addressed in the extant literature: (1) finding ways to theorise and empirically observe the transition from situated to global practices (generalisation challenge); and (2) assessing the exact role of interaction in structuring and transforming both the global and the local (challenge of relationism). The chapter ends by calling for a Global Practice Theory (GPT) as a way to tackle these two challenges.

1 Introduction International Relations (IR) scholars operate in an academic environment deeply affected by a culture of fields and subfields where drawing boundaries and setting hierarchies of values is often more important than acknowledging common histories, trajectories and synergies (Bell, 2009; Fierke & Jabri, 2019). This is especially problematic when it comes to the boundaries and hierarchies set up between IR and Area Studies (AS) (D’Amato et al., 2022). In fact, competing disciplinary politics within IR and AS have ensured the continuous reproduction of Western and American dominance of IR, favoured IR scholars over AS specialists and constrained the C. De Franco (B) Department of Political Science, Center for War Studies, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. D’Amato et al. (eds.), International Relations and Area Studies, Contributions to International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39655-7_6

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space of interaction between the two (Acharya, 2016; Bell, 2009; Chamlian, 2019; Fawcett et al., 2020; Katzenstein, 2002; Köllner et al., 2018; Teti, 2007). This, in turn, has hindered our ability to conceptualise the relationship between the local and the global (Acharya, 2014; Aris, 2021; Wiener, 2018) and therefore to best understand the challenges of our contemporary interconnected world (Chan et al., 2001; Fierke & Jabri, 2019). Nevertheless, cross-fertilisation between IR and European Studies (ES) has taken place often and challenged the very mainstream distinction of those two disciplines (Rosamond, 2007). In this chapter, I draw attention on the latest exchange between IR and ES, which has been sparked by a group of scholars who have established what is known as International Practice Theory (IPT) (Adler & Pouliot, 2011; Adler-Nissen, 2016; Bueger & Gadinger, 2018), an approach enjoying increasing popularity and influence over IR research agendas and methods (Bueger & Gadinger, 2018, p. 3). IPT builds on the theoretical accounts normally known as Practice Theory and on the proposition that practice is the basic ordering medium in social life and the site where meaning is established (Bueger & Gadinger, 2018; Schatzki, 1997, p. 284). From an ontological point of view, IPT sees “international practices,” which are understood as embodied, shared and patterned actions in social context (Cornut, 2017; Leander, 2008), as “the stuff that drives the world and makes it “hang together”” (Bueger & Gadinger, 2015, p. 449). In terms of research strategy and methods, it implies a shift towards the study of the mundane everyday practices of diplomats, international governmental and non-governmental officials, legal experts, etc. and the use of ethnographic methods. These ontological and methodological moves have led IPT scholars to claim a disciplinary turn (Adler & Pouliot, 2011; Bueger & Gadinger, 2015, 2018; Cornut, 2017). While criticisms of IPT scholarship have been neither rare nor light (see e.g. Epstein, 2013b; Epstein & Wæver, forthcoming; Frost & Lechner, 2016; Ralph & Gifkins, 2017; Ringmar, 2016), in this chapter I assess the specific potential of IPT to become a bridge between IR and AS. I take IPT’s rendering of EU politics as a point of departure and discuss the possibility for IPT to work as a “trading zone” (Bueger & Gadinger, 2018; Galison, 1999) where IR and AS can converge to make sense of the interplay of the local and the global. In this context, I argue that while IPT scholars have fruitfully challenged traditional assumptions and distinctions of “levels of analysis” (Bueger & Gadinger, 2018, p. 2) that characterise both rationalist and constructivists approaches to IR and AS, more theoretical and empirical work is needed to make sense of the co-existence of local and global practices. As I am myself conducting research that draws heavily on IPT scholarship and thinking tools, this criticism is advanced as an internal and hopefully constructive critique. In fact, it is what I learnt in the course of fieldwork I have conducted in Brussels and remotely since February 2020 to research EU’s practices of “human protection” (Bellamy, 2016), which made me both convinced of IPT’s potential to become a trading zone between IR and AS and painfully aware of the challenges ahead. Thus, the key arguments presented in this chapter want to be conversation openers to engage the IPT community in what I feel is a much-needed discussion.

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In the following, I review some of the key contributions of IPT scholars to flag how they can be understood as being at the same time a product of and a challenge to a pre-existing common ground between IR and ES that had been established by constructivist scholarship (Tiilikainen, 2019). In this context, I assess the strengths of these contributions and I explain how they not only build new bridges between IR and ES, but also mark a clear path towards the establishment of a trading zone between IR and AS that can be productive of a new understanding of how the local and the global connect. Then, I reflect on two interrelated problems pertaining current formulations and applications of IPT to the case of the EU to demonstrate that some more clarity and reflectivity about theoretical and empirical choices is needed to make IPT up to the task of connecting the local and the global in novel and fruitful ways. Finally, I build on Fierke and Jabri’s conceptualisation of “global conversations” (Fierke & Jabri, 2019) to call for a Global Practice Theory (GPT) that could take us beyond those disciplinary pecking orders that separate IR from AS and hinder our ability to appreciate the interconnectedness of the local with the global.

2 IPT as a Trading Zone Between IR and ES Since Adler-Nissen called for a “practice turn” in ES (Adler-Nissen, 2016), research employing practice theory in the study of the EU has produced a burgeoning literature. In fact, research applying IPT’s thinking tools to the European case accounts for some of the key works and authors constituting IPT scholarship1 and some of the bestknown IPT scholars would most probably define themselves as being IR and ES scholars at the same time.2 Retrospectively, Adler-Nissen’s call for a practice turn in ES seems somehow misplaced because the amount and relevance of IPT work on the EU suggest that the practice turn in IR has rather strong roots into ES and can be considered a product of the constructivist common ground between IR and ES, which led to key theoretical and empirical breakthroughs in the last two decades of the twentieth century (Tiilikainen, 2019).3 It is indeed worth reflecting on the fact that some of the key conceptual tools of IPT have been developed iteratively through situated research on EU politics and institutions. The burgeoning literature building on Wenger’s understanding of communities of practice, for example, is somehow dependent on those key initial works by Adler that focused on the European example (see e.g. Adler, 2004, 2008, 2009) and continues to be much anchored onto the observation of EU politics (see e.g. Bicchi, 2011; Hofius, 2016). The same can be said about other flourishing bodies of IPT 1

Confront, for example, the works cited in this chapter with the ones discussed by Bueger and Gadinger to take stock of the practice turn (Bueger & Gadinger, 2018). 2 Rebecca Adler-Nissen, for example, has been a member of the board of the Danish European Community Studies Association (ECSA-DK) between 2013 and 2017. 3 It can be argued that this applies more in general to the role of constructivism in AS, as per the discussion by Teti (2007).

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research such as those exploring diplomatic practices (Adler-Nissen & Drieschova, 2019; Adler-Nissen, 2014a; Mérand, 2006, 2010; Mérand & Rayroux, 2016) and transnational governance (see e.g. Bigo, 2000; Ekengren, 2018; Kauppi, 2003, 2018; Kauppi & Madsen, 2014). Having reviewed this literature and building on Adler-Nissen’s original article (Adler-Nissen, 2016), I believe it is possible to argue that IPT is a trading zone where IR and ES scholars have shared “some material and some theoretical moves (…) despite “global” disjunction” (Galison, 1999, p. 280; De Franco, 2022). I also argue that as trading zones can create and expand (as well as annihilate or constrict) shifting fields of work, with their hybrid identities, values, languages, machines, simulations and theoretical moves (Galison, 1999, p. 284), IPT has the potential to become a “larger” trading zone where IR and AS scholars can together recast the way we conceive the interaction between the local and the global. In the following, I identify three areas where attention to practices has produced novel and valuable contributions to EU studies, which demonstrate IPT’s potential as a trading zone.

3 IPT’s New Take on How the Local and the Global Connect IPT can be understood as a family of accounts envisioning social life as a nexus of practices (Bueger & Gadinger, 2015). While these accounts share a similarly critical stance against other social theories that situate intelligibility in textuality, as for post-structuralism or traditional constructivism, they understand and study practice in significantly different ways (Bueger & Gadinger, 2018). To orientate the reader through the muddy waters of the different IPT approaches and flash out how IPT improves our understanding of how the global and local connect, I focus on IPT’s “canon” only (ibid.). I specifically discuss scholars building on Bourdieusian sociology (Bourdieu, 1990), Wenger’s conception of communities of practice (Wenger, 1998), and Foucault’s governmentality (Foucault, 2007). I am aware that in so doing I let go of some of the sophisticated nuances that characterise the work of the many authors I discuss. In fact, I de facto reify some “ideal types” of IPT research based on some specific pieces that might not correspond to the variability and distinctiveness of “real” authors. Nevertheless, following Reckwitz, this should be understood as a necessary strategy to “succeed in approaching the identity of practice theories (an identity, which is doubtless still not highly stable)” (Reckwitz, 2002).

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3.1 Focusing on the Everyday of European Integration and EU Institutions While most EU scholarship stems from assumptions about the explanatory power of established factors for understanding EU politics (e.g. agent’s motives and resources, cost/benefits ratio, ideas and norms), practice theory questions the utility of such predetermined choices. Instead, it advocates for the examination of the unfolding of everyday practices, which engender the broader phenomena and societal construct denoted as “EU politics” or “European Integration.” Thus, instead of working with predetermined variables, practice theories employ thinking tools and sensitising concepts that allow to approach practice abductively, eschewing the notion “that objects or structures have a fixed, stable identity or that closure is achieved at some point” (Adler-Nissen, 2016, p. 94). To capture the everyday of the EU, IPT scholars have looked at it through the lenses of different concepts. Studies focusing on the EU as a community of practice have, for example, shed new light on how the everyday of EU practitioners brings about a “EU way” of doing things and transcends national boundaries and differences through a high degree of mutual engagement and the establishment of shared repertoires of practice. First opened by Adler (2004, 2009), this stream of IPT research has produced a number of flagship publications looking at the EU as such or at specific EU departments, units or delegations as communities of practice and investigating to what extent they support or hinder coordination with other international organisations and/or EU member states (EUMS) (see e.g. Bicchi, 2011, 2016; Græger, 2016). Foucault’s concept of governmentality, instead, has been used to make sense of the EU normative agenda and demonstrate the normative relevance of those governing techniques, which make up for the EU’s everyday operationalisation of international norms such as Human Rights (Huelss, 2017). Similarly, the EU’s democracy promotion tools have been studied to show that they shape the model of democracy that the EU promotes as well as the power relations between the EU and the local democratizers (Kurki, 2011). As for the studies inspired by Bourdiesian sociology, they have ventured into an exploration of how the EU’s internal and external actions contribute to transnational governance (Ekengren, 2018; Kauppi, 2018; Kauppi & Madsen, 2014) and produce a field of security practice where the internal and the external are hardly distinguishable (Bigo, 2000). In this context, the everyday of EU politics appears shaped by the practical predisposition and background knowledge of the practitioners involved more than by any intrinsic characteristics of the problem they try to respond to or intergovernmental dynamics. It has been shown, for example, how EU officials and diplomats during the aftermath of the Arab Spring acted on the basis of dispositions and background knowledge that had developed over several decades of EU’s Mediterranean policies (Bremberg, 2016) and how, more in general, individual EU representatives respond to specific local context and situations by bringing in their embodied and unconscious “memory” of earlier experiences (Ekengren, 2018). It has been also discussed how resources like connections, reputation, poise, charm and

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presence matter in formal and informal meetings as they structure complex distinctions between well-informed and relaxed insiders—normally representatives of “old” EUMS—and ill-informed and ill-at-ease outsiders—normally the representatives of “new” EUMS (Kuus, 2014, 2015). Finally, the diplomatic practices of negotiations within COREPER have been brought to light to show how long-standing routines and habits are affected by changes in the use of information and communication technology (ICT) (Adler-Nissen & Drieschova, 2019). In the quest for a better understanding of local/global dynamics, IPT’s focus on situated practice is important because the local and the global come to be understood as neither different geographical sites of practice nor different historical moments in an expanding world (Wenger, 1998, p. 131). Instead, they can be seen as related levels of participation in a practice that always coexist and shape each other (ibid.), constituted through assemblages of practice (Brandenburg, 2017; Bueger, 2018), or produced at the intersection of different fields of practice (Bigo, 2000; Leander, 2008).

3.2 Recasting Conceptions of Power and Agency Through a Relational Ontology Practice theoretical approaches build on a relational ontology that implies a novel understanding of both power and agency as emergent from practices and observable through agents’ interactions. On this view, social interactions are the fundamental building blocks of social life (Adler-Nissen, 2016, p. 95), and therefore neither power nor agency can be assessed as general capabilities or resources: they are deeply contextual. This is a pivotal facet to advance understanding of the interconnectedness of the local and the global. It requires observing how the global is structured through situated interactions in national as well as transnational settings and how both power and agency emerging from such encounters assume global relevance through the configuration of different transnational fields of practice (according to a Bourdieusian approach), the expansion of linkages across different communities of practice (according to a community of practice approach), or the deployment of governance techniques (according to a Foucauldian approach). In the extant IPT literature, the EU’s agency is depicted as emerging from a two-way relationship between transnational practices and translocal action and the specific practical sense of how to act that comes with it (Ekengren, 2018, p. 20). In the specific field of counter-piracy practice, for example, research has shown how the EU managed to become a core actor off the coast of Somalia through daily practical work, which was recognised as “competent” by other actors in the field (Bueger, 2016). The “power” of the EU is also described in terms that fundamentally challenge the way in which EU foreign policy is normally studied, that is, departing from classical explanations based on capability-expectation gaps, Normative Power Europe (NPE),

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etc. (Diez, 2005; see e.g. Hill, 1993; Larsen, 2020; Manners, 2002, 2006). The very notion of NPE has been revisited on the basis of the community of practice concept and therefore recast as “a transnational polity with a security community of practice in its midst” that breaks “ground with the concept of modernity from a power-politics perspective” (Adler, 2009, p. 74). Thus, NPE operates via practices of “cooperative security,” on the basis of self-restraint, and through its “magnetic attraction” (Adler, 2009, p. 72). Similarly, the power of the European External Action Service (EEAS) has been evaluated not through the lenses of traditional power-based analysis of EU foreign policy, but in terms of the EEAS’s challenge to the state’s monopoly of symbolic power in the European diplomatic field (Adler-Nissen, 2014b). By exploring how the EEAS and the national foreign services struggle over the appointments of Heads of Delegations and consular affairs, it has been argued that the EEAS “questions the state as ‘a central bank for symbolic credit,’” making national foreign services unease, despite its limited material power (Adler-Nissen, 2014b, p. 659).

3.3 Focusing on How Theories and Practices Interact Even if by and large, IPT emphasises the role of practical, embodied and reflexive knowledge in everyday practices, it is also interested in metatheoretical reflections on how scientific knowledge is co-constitutive of policy practice (Bueger, 2012; Bueger & Gadinger, 2007). This opens to considerations about how the local and the global are sites of knowledge production and how theory and practice are entangled in the social construction of what is local and what is global in the first place. With respect to a better understanding of EU politics, practice theoretical approaches develop on the basis of awareness of the fact that the social sciences play an important role in shaping ideas and practices of European integration (Adler-Nissen & Kropp, 2015)—and vice versa (Chamlian, 2019). This has significant implications also on the specific ES’ agenda, which has so far neglected the interconnectedness of theories and practices of European integration and politics and has still to develop a full understanding of how EU’s policies and instruments in support of scientific research are key components of the EU’s global “actorness.”

4 The Limits of IPT’s Understanding of How Local and Global Connect As discussed above, the focus on practice as patterned actions in a context, the conception of power and agency as emergent from social interaction, and the careful consideration of different sites of knowledge production make IPT a likely candidate to become a trading zone for IR and ES/AS scholars interested in rethinking the

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local–global nexus. However, two interrelated challenges can be noted, which IPT needs to address to advance interdisciplinary understanding of how the local and the global connect.

4.1 The “Generalisation” Challenge Most IPT research seems to follow the practical guideline that “defining what counts as an international practice and what does not is best left to practitioners themselves in their actual performance of world politics” (Adler & Pouliot, 2011, p. 6). Such a proposition hides the interpretative work that is still necessary to identify practices out of practitioners’ accounts of given actions (Epstein & Wæver, forthcoming). It also hides the interpretative work that it is needed to transform the idiosyncratic performances that constitute practices into entities with some degree of stability across time and space (Hui, 2017). Most importantly for this discussion, it inhibits reflection on what it takes for practice to be “international,” and what does indeed mean that practice can be local, or global. In the IPT literature focusing on the EU, lack of reflectivity on this issue translates into a tendency to jump—without explanation—from situated practices to EU-wide patterned ways of doings things. Even when the fragmentation of EU practice is emphasised, this always comes with some degree of generalisation. The community of practice approach, for example, while holding the promise of a better understanding of the EU’s institutional complexities, is divided between research offering unitary visions of the EU as one single community in the interaction with other international actors and the vision of a fragmented reality made of more complex constellations of communities of practice (cfr e.g. Adler, 2009; Bicchi, 2011, 2016; Græger, 2016; Lequesne, 2015). The difference between the two visions lays only in how far research goes with the generalisation of practice, but they both lack convincing explanations of how situated practices can become far-reaching. Other IPT approaches to the EU display the same ambiguity about how contextual and situated practices are and to what extent we can imagine practices and communities to be ultimately generalisable to the whole of the EU. For example, authors employing the concept of assemblage have produced insightful case studies where the specific dynamics of specific assemblages of practices (and agents) in given regions/ crises have been used to characterise a certain way of “doing Europe” in broader policy fields (Brandenburg, 2017; see e.g. Bueger, 2016). Understanding how to move from situated to more widespread practices has been a key concern underpinning my own research. In fact, my analysis of EU diplomatic practices has underscored the existence of different EU diplomatic actors (or communities of practice) with different social and symbolical capitals, performing different understandings of “doing diplomacy” and competing among each other over the definition of the “genuine diplomat” (De Franco, forthcoming). Making sense of these findings has not been easy as they contrast with unitary visions of an EU diplomatic corps in a competition with national diplomatic services (Adler-Nissen,

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2014b), but also with work emphasising a “limited fragmentation” of practice and drawing boundaries between practices and communities according to geographical locations (Bicchi, 2016; Hofius, 2016), or seniority in EU institutions (Kuus, 2014, 2015; Lequesne, 2015). In social research, this problem is normally explained in terms of micro and macro levels of analysis (Turner & Boyns, 2001) and this is also how a few IPT scholars have been reflecting on it (see, eg., Bicchi & Bremberg, 2016; Ekengren, 2018). It has been argued that a macro approach to the EU as a single community and a micro approach emphasising the EU as a “community of communities” are compatible (Bicchi, 2011, p. 1119), but it is unclear why this is the case. It is true that the EU can be conceived as “a ‘community without unity’ in which senses of belonging emerge in the absence of a homogeneous ‘we’” (Hofius, 2016, p. 941), but this hardly solves the problem of understanding how we move from the situatedness of practice to its generalisation to a wide range of actors, sites and temporalities. To understand this problematique and why it is relevant to my argument, it is key to realise that from a practice perspective this issue is actually not about the micro– macro gap (Turner & Boyns, 2001), but about the local–global nexus. Drawing particularly from Latour’s insights, the global emerges precisely as the social space that comes into existence because of the recursivity of practice across time and space. Conversely, the local is a space of interaction that is made possible by those partitions, frames, umbrellas, fire-breaks that constitute a veritable boundary between the local and the global, although this demarcation is notably permeable (Latour, 1996). This argument is relevant to IPT’s ambition to overcome traditional dichotomies, such as the one between agents and structure (Adler & Pouliot, 2011). In fact, Latour’s theorisation of how the local and the global come about is very much based on the co-existence of agents and structure. In Latour’s own words: ‘Neither individual action nor structure are thinkable without the work of rendering local – through channelling, partition, focusing, reduction – and without the work of rendering global – through instrumentation, compilation, punctualization, amplification’. (Latour, 1996, p. 234)

Against social theorising starting from either the agent or the structure, practice theory can look at the rendering of localization and globalisation and their interconnectedness to make sense of all of society (Latour, 1996, p. 234). However, this is not what IPT scholars have done so far. Take for example Adler-Nissen and Drieschova’s analysis of “track-change diplomacy” (Adler-Nissen & Drieschova, 2019): while the authors spend almost half a page to produce a convincing argument about the generalisability of their results based on a number of characteristics of the EU as a multilateral venue, they leave somehow on the margins a necessary discussion of how the diplomatic practices they study are situated and embedded in layered historical transformations and if it makes sense to imagine their recursivity at a more global level. Studying the EU as a space of global–local connectivity from a practice-theoretical perspective should then be an opportunity to observe how the local–global nexus is a multiscalar phenomenon that requires careful consideration of the localisation and

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globalisation of practice. This is no easy task though as it requires the development of specific theoretical lenses building on existing tools such as communities or fields of practice, but departing quite fundamentally from extant generalisation reasoning that have so far led IPT scholars to assume that practice is easily transposable and generalisable—for example through cultural schemas and anchoring processes (see e.g. Adler & Pouliot, 2011; Swidler, 2001).

4.2 The Challenge of Relationism A second challenge IPT needs to address pertains the way in which IPT scholars implement the relational ontology that they claim to be key to their endeavour. In principle, such an ontology comprehends relations as primary entities. However, having observed how IPT has so far implemented relationism, I believe a careful consideration of the exact role of interaction and its ability to compose all society is direly needed (Latour, 1996, p. 229). IPT’s understanding of relationism seems based on an individual ontology which conceives international actors like the EU as unable to achieve any goal without passing through interactions with partners, but also as fundamentally pre-existing and never fundamentally altered by interaction. Such understanding of relationism is not the only one possible though, as more transformative and radical understandings exist, as in Barad’s for example (Barad, 2007), which might be better suited to grasp local–global connectivity. Thus, relationism entails a conceptualization challenge that so far has not been dealt with reflectively enough. I had a taste of this problem in the course of research about the much-contested development of the European Peace Facility (EPF) when I understood I could not conceive it as just the result of a negotiation among EUMS mediated by EU institutions. Instead, I needed to look at such development as contingent to the state of the so-called AU-EU strategic partnership and as transformative of the agency of both the AU and the EU within that partnership (De Franco & Gelot, forthcoming). Furthermore, since the EPF, which substitutes an earlier funding instrument called African Peace Facility, is considered by many as fundamentally changing the nature of EU’s external action (Deneckere, 2019; Godefroy & Chinitz, 2019) and breaking expectations based on NPE conceptualizations, I had to understand to what extent AU-EU interaction is transformative of EU’s global practices. In effect, the challenge posed by relationism is also empirical. In the extant IPT literature about the EU the relational ontology seems to apply mainly to the dynamics between EU institutions, on the one hand, and EUMS on the other (Adler-Nissen & Drieschova, 2019; see e.g. Bicchi, 2011) while EU’s interactions with other international actors and organisations remain relatively marginal. To develop a better understanding of relationism we need more work in line with research on transnational fields or assemblages, but more reflective on what relationism entails than these extant literatures have been so far. The challenge of developing an understanding of relationism that accounts for transformative interaction is interrelated with the previous challenge because it is

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fundamentally about carefully considering the role of interaction in the structuring of practice and its recursivity from the local to the global and vice-versa. Thus, when we study the relationship between the EU and other international actors it makes a substantive difference to conceive the EU as a unitary—even civilizational— community or as a constellation of communities. In Græeger’s work (2016), for example, the claim that some loose EU-NATO communities of practice are emerging is based on a case studies of two CSDP missions that overlooks the significance of fractures within and across those organisations’ practices. Flagging the generalisation and the relationism challenges means to stress how in its current applications IPT is fundamentally reproducing IR’s traditional disconnect between the local and the global. This is problematic, not only because it is at odds with the explicit ambitions of at least some strands of practice theory (see e.g. Wenger, 1998), but also because it somehow diminishes the innovative value of IPT’s contribution to both IR and ES.

5 Moving Towards a Global Practice Theory A shift from an International Practice Theory to a Global Practice Theory (GPT) can be a way to create a new conversation between scholars of IR and AS and move them closer together in an attempt at furthering our understanding of the interplay of the local and the global. This is not just a matter of lexicon: GPT could contribute substantially to the way “the Global” is conceptualised in the first place and obtain important gains from shifting attention to those specific organisations and locales that entail a dialectic between the local and the global. This idea builds on Fierke and Jabri’s work on what they call “global conversations” (Fierke & Jabri, 2019). To them, studying global conversations entails moving decisively from the kind of individual ontology based on the notion of “inter” relations that characterises IPT and IR more in general, to a relational ontology making better sense of the global as the interconnected space of politics we live in. In fact, “a conversation is an exchange between multiple parties that changes all who are involved” (Fierke & Jabri, 2019, p. 510): it is a form of “intra-action” (Barad, 2007). On this view, conversations among IR scientists as well as policy makers are understood as transformative of the boundaries of difference that constitute the world, including cultural differences between various locales and distinctions between national and international, internal and external, global and local. This is very much in line with Latour’s suggestion to look at the local and the global as always co-existing and constantly re-arranged through practice (Latour, 1996). In fact, for IPT a shift towards a relationism of “intra-action” would entail also approaching the generalisation challenge in a novel way: by studying the sites of global conversations as fundamentally structuring the transition from local to global and vice-versa. It would also mean treating boundary-marking as a fundamental object of study to understand the complexity of global–local dynamics and their role in reproducing states, regions, the West/non-West distinction, or neo-colonial

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relations of power (Fierke & Jabri, 2019, p. 514), which is very much in line with Wenger’s suggestion to look at how practice is “an emergent structure in which learning constantly creates localities that reconfigure the geography” (Wenger, 1998, p. 131). Furthermore, a focus on “global conversations” makes it possible to account for the part language plays in giving practice some stability and coherence across time and space, therefore allowing for the transition from the local to the global (and vice-versa) (Gahrn-Andersen, 2019). It entails scrutinising those practices that are constitutive of both the local and the global through language use, without having to refer to wider concepts, such as culture, to assume practice’s transposability and generalisability (as in Swidler, 2001 for example). It would also mean to move more decisively towards a relational ontology that is more in line with constructivism’s founding project (Epstein, 2013a) and grasp the agency of those actors—including the EU—that have a relevant role in those processes where agency and identity are structured in and through language. From this vantage point, an analysis of the EU as a constellation of communities of practice might become sharper and more precise and the issue of the generalisation of practice might be mitigated because “doing the EU” (or any other regional organisations, or “local” actor) would become a matter of situated entanglements where EU practitioners intra-act with other parties in a process of mutual (re)definition. Finally, as I call for a GPT focused on global conversations, I also offer a way to overcome the problem I flagged at the beginning of this chapter: the artificial and counterproductive nature that characterises academic disciplinary fractures and pecking orders between IR and AS. This is because GPT’s attention to global conversations would entail a shift in epistemological terms. The concept of “global conversations” problematises the frequent emphasis in IR on cultures and regions as the predefined “otherness” that the dominating “Western” academia should have dialogues with—a logic that applies also to some calls to bridge IR and AS (Aris, 2021). The concept also problematises those disciplinary divides that enforce given narratives and methods and liberates “epistemology from prescribed edicts that claim the universality of validity and criteria of judgement, as well as from ‘standpoint’ epistemology, where the subject invoked is somehow predetermined in gender, class, or cultural terms” (Fierke & Jabri, 2019, p. 517).

6 Conclusion This chapter has built on a review of the different contributions of IPT scholarship to the understanding of EU politics to demonstrate IPT’s potential to become a trading zone for IR and AS scholars to further our understanding of how the local and the global are interconnected. In this context, the chapter has assessed strengths and weaknesses of the extant applications of practice theories to EU politics to underline two challenges that IPT needs to address to fully realise this potential: (1) finding ways to theorise and empirically observe the transition from the level of situated

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practices to EU-wide doings (generalisation challenge); and (2) assessing the exact role of interaction in structuring and transforming both the global and the local (challenge of relationism). It is worth stressing that underlining these two issues does not want to be a sterile provocation, but a way to prompt a reflection on what can be achieved if those challenges are addressed. Clearly IPT has made some efforts to employ a fully-fledged relational ontology (see especially Brandenburg, 2017; Bremberg, 2016; Bueger, 2016), it has expressed concerns about the issues of generalisation of practices (see, eg., Bicchi & Bremberg, 2016) and findings (see, e.g., Ekengren, 2018), and has started looking in the direction of boundary-making as structuring practice (Hofius, 2016). Nevertheless, more work is needed to make sense of the local–global nexus and transform IPT into a trading zone for IR and AS scholars. This would be an important development also to overcome the problem I flagged at the beginning of this chapter: the distinctions and pecking orders separating IR from AS. I close by inviting the IPT community to seriously consider the option of working towards a Global Practice Theory that can further practice theory’s appeal for both IR and AS scholars by paying attention to those global conversations where the rendering of the local and the global can be located and observed without having to assume any form of practice “generalisation.”

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Swidler, A. (2001). What anchors cultural practices. In K. Knorr Cetina, T. R. Schatzki, & E. von Savigny (Eds.), The practice turn in contemporary theory (pp. 83–101). Taylor & Francis Group. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/sdub/detail.action?docID=235322 Teti, A. (2007). Bridging the gap: IR, middle east studies and the disciplinary politics of the area studies controversy. European Journal of International Relations, 13(1), 117–145. https://doi. org/10.1177/1354066107074291 Tiilikainen, T. (2019). Theory of European integration as a challenge to IR theories. Global Affairs, 5(4–5), 477–484. https://doi.org/10.1080/23340460.2020.1722957 Turner, J. H., & Boyns, D. E. (2001). The return of grand theory. In J. H. Turner (Ed.), Handbook of sociological theory (pp. 353–378). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-36274-6_18 Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge University Press. Wiener, A. (2018). Contestation and constitution of norms in global international relations (1st ed.). Cambridge University Press.

International Relations in the Margins. Education for Peace, Education Against Extremism in Kosovo Ervjola Selenica

Abstract The chapter argues that education is relevant for both domestic and international reasons and without an incorporation of the international within the national it is not possible to understand education’s changes and transformations in post-conflict and conflict-affected contexts. The chapter aims to connect the local to the global by investigating their dynamic interaction through the peculiar lenses of international assistance to education reform in post-conflict Kosovo. It asks two questions: (1) How do global agendas of peace and security affect education reforms in conflict-affected contexts?; (2) How does education reform in conflict-affected contexts interact with and is related to broader, international dynamics, processes and actors? More specifically, the chapter analyses the role of international actors in traditionally national sectors and the multi-layered, hybrid governance of education reform within a broader statebuilding, peacebuilding and stabilisation perspective. The analysis is divided into two empirical instances: (i) education for liberal multicultural peace (1999–2013) and (ii) education against violent extremism and radicalisation (2014–2019). The chapter sheds light on the globalisation and securitisation of education as well as the changing forms and practice of statehood and sovereignty in times of post-war reconstruction and fragility. A threat-containment and security-based logic has dictated priorities and determined choices in education reform and content. The following chapter was partially published in the Special Issue of the Italian Political Science Review titled ‘Reaching for allies? The dialectics and overlaps between International Relations and Area Studies in the study of politics, security and conflicts’), with the title ‘Analysing a non-IR field through IR lenses. Education in post-conflict Kosovo’, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/italian-political-science-review-rivistaitaliana-di-scienza-politica/article/analysing-a-nonir-field-through-ir-lenses-educat ion-in-postconflict-kosovo/9911711C02362C5436DE787940126B71. Keywords Education · IR · Conflict · Kosovo · Peacebuilding · Security · Violent extremism · Global governance E. Selenica (B) University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. D’Amato et al. (eds.), International Relations and Area Studies, Contributions to International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39655-7_7

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1 Introduction This chapter argues that education in ethno-national and post-conflict contexts is relevant for both national and international reasons and without an incorporation of the international within the domestic, it is not possible to understand education’s changes and transformations in post-conflict settings. The chapter aims to connect the local to the global and investigate the dynamic interaction between the two through the peculiar and under-analysed lenses of education reform in post-conflict international interventions. It asks the following two questions: (1) how do global agendas of peace and security affect education reforms in conflict-affected contexts? and (2) how does education reform in conflict-affected contexts interacts with and is related to broader, international dynamics, processes and actors? In order to address both questions, the chapter uses post-conflict Kosovo as a case study that traces the changing relationship between international interventions and education across twenty years. The time frame chosen allows grasping changes both in the international system and in global agendas of peace and security and how they are reflected upon and translated into education reform. The chapter analyses externally led education reform in Kosovo, a sector considered by IR theories and scholars as a national prerogative thus fundamentally overlooked and ignored, whose governance and changes both at the global and local level contribute to shed light on many key concepts and processes that have dominated the IR discipline since the end of the Cold War. Despite three decades of international and global processes that have permeated education in conflict-affected and post-conflict contexts, IR continues to be silent and oblivious with regard to the role of global dynamics and the international system in national education and viceversa. In particular, in this chapter, I aim to analyse how education is being reconstructed and rebuilt through international agendas and interventions in post-conflict Kosovo and what this can tell us about the relationship between international dynamics and local processes in a globalised world. The interaction between the local and the global is investigated through a double peripherality lens, i.e., a peripheral subject in IR scholarship such as education in a peripheral region such as Kosovo, and it aims to contribute theoretically and methodologically to the interaction between International Relations and Area Studies as premised by this edited volume. The findings in this chapter suggest the importance of incorporating sectors such as education as key dimensions for understanding and grasping change in the international system. The chapter highlights the need for studying the global, international, regional and local as co-constitutive rather than as separate layers. The case study analysed finds that education reform and assistance as part of contemporary processes of state formation in peripheral regions are dialectally related and shaped by substantial forms of international interventions and are thus central to contemporary international dynamics. The analysis proposed here suggests that the borders between what is internal from what is international are continuously shifted and negotiated through processes of globalisation, international interventionism and

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new forms of internationally driven education assistance. Thus, education should not be overlooked in IR since education agendas can be shaped and influenced by international dynamics, agendas and actors and this is sharply visible and tangible in post-war Kosovo. Theoretically, the analysis is based on critical cultural political economy and genealogical historical narrative (Bevir, 2008; Robertson & Dale, 2015). The critical cultural political economy analytical framework places education in the broader socioeconomic and political structures, institutions and agents that affect and constrain it (Robertson & Dale, 2015). It also stresses the importance of politics and policy in shaping the governance frameworks, institutional arrangements and outcomes of education in conflict-affected contexts (Novelli et al., 2014). The genealogical approach critically historicise the evolution of education’s role and functions in the Kosovo conflict as well as its intertwinement with conflict and peace dynamics. In looking at education as a complex (more than a) system, the category of ‘education ensemble’ as used by Robertson and Dale (2015) is particularly useful for this chapter. They urge to see the ‘education ensemble’. As a complex collective, construction of the social world, that is not reducible to schools, or universities, learners and teachers. [...] Education involves an array of actors and other institutions, [...] whose logics, interests and forms of authority generate tensions and contradictions within the ensemble. [...] Education is the outcome of sets of ideas and activities accredited over generations, which, whilst individually irreducible to each other, can be seen to be in an internal relationship with each other in the production of the ensemble. [...] there can be no understanding of the individual elements of the ensemble, without an overall understanding of it. (Robertson & Dale, 2015, pp. 155–156)

The broader concept of ‘ensemble’ is useful in that it places education in multiple relationships with(in) societies and it allows detecting the range of relationships within education and between education and the broader society. As methods for data collection, the chapter draws on case study analysis, textual analysis of key official documents and policy reports from the Kosovo Government, the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology and main international actors that have been engaged with education reform. Furthermore, the chapter relies on primary data collected in Pristina throughout November 2013 and September 2018 through ten semi-structured interviews respectively.1 Key national and international actors that were interviewed in Kosovo in the two respective fieldworks were grouped into three categories: (1) main international actors such as UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the European Union (EU), the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammernarbeit (GIZ), bilateral partners such as the US Embassy; (2) government officials within the Ministry of Education; (3) representatives from the NGO/civil society arena, activists, opposition parties. In order to analyse post-war education reform in Kosovo and how the sector is embedded in international dynamics and agendas, the analysis is structured as 1

All interviews were conducted in confidentiality, and the names of interviewees are withheld by mutual agreement.

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follows. The first three sections aim to locate education within broader processes of globalisation, international interventions and peace and security agendas with the aim of identifying knowledge gaps and bridging different theoretical discussions. The first section reviews debates on the globalisation of education. The second section analyses the relationship between education, conflict and peacebuilding interventions. The third section explores the growing securitisation of the education sector as it is incorporated in national, regional and global policies and agendas of counterterrorism, countering violent extremism and counter-radicalisation. The fourth section provides a background of the relationship between education and conflict in the Kosovo context. The fifth section unpacks and explores some of the theoretical debates exposed in the previous sections through the empirical case study analysis of post-war education reconstruction, reform and assistance in post-conflict Kosovo by focusing on international agendas and actors. This section is analytically and chronologically divided into two instances—education for peace between 1999 and 2013 and education against violent extremism between 2014 and 2019—whose priorities, as the analysis finds, are underpinned by international security imperatives reflecting broader changes in international agendas of intervention. Lastly, the chapter connects some of the theoretical debates discussed with the empirical analysis and put forth theoretical and methodological reflections in line with the objectives of this edited volume.

2 Education Between National and Global Governance Education has been historically central to nation-building (Anderson, 1991), in terms of citizenship building, social cohesion and the construction of the labour force for the national economy (Dale, 1989). However, the historical congruence between nationbuilding and public education has been transformed by processes of globalisation and international peacebuilding interventions (Dale, 1999; Duffield, 2008; Selenica, 2018). The present chapter argues that the consolidated nexus between education and the state that one observes during the process of Western state formation is evolving and that one can observe this change by studying new states such as Kosovo emerging out of wars in the twenty-first century. In the past decade, a growing number of scholars of comparative sociology and development studies have analysed education and global governance, in particular, the increasingly global nature of education agenda-setting and policy-making/ implementation (Verger et al., 2012).2 They have in particular analysed the reasons,

2

The development of education policies and agendas at the international, global, supra-national level and their diffusion into the local level has been defined within the field of comparative education in many ways such as “[p]olicy borrowing, policy transfer, policy travelling, isomorphism or convergence” (Verger et al., 2012, p. 3).

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factors and agents behind the globalisation of education policy, and the ways, structures and events through which a global education policy agenda is being constituted at the supra-national level while being contextualised at the local level (Robertson & Dale, 2015; Sobe, 2015; Verger et al., 2012). Here, particular emphasis is laid on the role of international organisations and other political (state or non-state) actors to shape and disseminate education policies globally and the ways through which local contexts reply, comply or resist such policies. Developing countries and their policy landscapes are highly penetrated by global agendas given their substantial dependency on aid, foreign expertise and information (Rose, 2007). In such countries, the multiplicity of international non-governmental organisations (INGOs), international organisations (IOs) and donor agencies have the material and ideational capacities to set agendas and priorities. The relationship between global education policies and national education systems and the effects of globalisation on education have been analysed by neoinstitutionalist approaches (i.e., ‘World Society’ Theory) and international political economy approaches (i.e., ‘Globally Structured Agenda for Education’). Education, in the view of world society scholars, is a key sector for national governments for external and internal legitimacy purposes. Expanding schooling is part of conforming and converging to world models of the organisation of sovereignty (Verger et al., 2012, p. 11). By contrast, for political economy approaches, the world capitalist economy is the driving force behind globalisation, and economic globalisation (and the related competitive pressure) is the main driving force behind the transformations occurring in education (Dale, 2000). For these scholars, globalisation can be seen as a political force, which indirectly affects education by altering the structural conditions within which educational change and reform take place (Dale, 2000; Verger et al., 2012, p. 13). Such approaches bring to the fora the changing nature of state sovereignty by showing how fundamental education policies are being taken by international or transnational networks and organisations beyond the control of democratically elected institutions (Verger et al., 2012). These comparative education perspectives emphasise the globalising effects on education policy and practice. However, by over-emphasising such globalising effects they have overlooked equally relevant processes such as civil war and post-conflict international interventions of peacebuilding that do shape education in a myriad of conflict-affected settings. Therefore, using a ‘globalisation/globalising’ lens is not enough for understanding the reform of education, its changing forms and functions, and the transformation of its nexus with the nation-state. Broader processes of postconflict reconstruction and international intervention need to be incorporated in the analysis as this chapter has tried to do. However, scholarly contributions reviewing statebuilding and peacebuilding processes have only superficially touched upon the issue of education, relegating its role in the post-war peacebuilding architecture as one among several social services that need to be re-established and provided. The chapter aims to contribute to the missed conversation between these different strands of scholarship and thus bridge different theoretical perspectives in order to show how education is at the centre of international dynamics. It aims to pave the way

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to the establishment of a critical and interdisciplinary research agenda that put at the centre of IR scholarship a sector that may contribute to illuminate broader shifts and changes in the international system. Through the peculiar angle of education in post-conflict Kosovo, the chapter contributes to and sheds light on national and international processes and dynamics. It shows how the national is dialectically shaped by and linked to the international. At the national level, the chapter shows that in post-conflict and conflict-affected contexts, the historically symbiotic relationship between education and the state is changing and being challenged by international dynamics, processes and actors.

3 Education, Wars and Post-conflict Peacebuilding In the post-Cold War, civil wars that proliferated along European and global peripheries came to be conceptualised by the United Nations as a threat to international peace and security. This paved the way to a new era of liberal interventionism through an ambitious UN agenda, which came to be known as liberal peace3 (Boutros-Ghali, 1992; Paris, 1997, 2004). The Balkans, and more specifically Kosovo, served as a laboratory to test most of the ideas and policies behind the liberal peace agenda and also trace its evolution and changes. Following the 78-day NATO bombing campaign that ended the war in Kosovo, the UN Security Council established, in June 1999, the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) through Security Council Resolution 1244. The international intervention in Kosovo represented the highest peak of international commitment in war-torn societies. What makes it different from previous peacebuilding missions is the inclusion as part of the international administration of a national sector such as education traditionally falling out of the scope and mandate of international actors (Selenica, 2018). Although a conspicuously multi-spatial and multi-level engagement of international actors in the education reform of post-conflict and conflict-affected contexts can be observed, education is still marginal if not absent topic from IR, peacebuilding and statebuilding scholarship (Novelli & Smith, 2011; Selenica, 2018). Critical peacebuilding scholarship, while more careful in grasping local agency and in providing with alternative accounts to the liberal peace agenda, has failed to account for the place and role of education in peacebuilding or to recognise the marginalisation of education within peacebuilding practice and theory (Selenica, 2018). 3

Liberal peace consisted of a series of reform that were implemented and transplanted in postconflict countries regardless of the specific context, comprising at the political level democratization and free elections and at the economic level liberalization, marketization and privatization, while also prioritising security sector reform, free media and human rights at the expense of other overlooked social sector and locally grounded reforms (Paris and Sisk, 2009; Richmond, 2011; Visoka and Musliu, 2020).

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By contrast, ‘education and conflict’ scholarship has investigated and highlighted the complex and multiple ways in which education can potentially contribute to sustainable peace and development in post-conflict settings, for example, by addressing conflict root causes, increasing state legitimacy, fostering social cohesion and change, building inclusive citizenship and contributing to social justice (McCandless, 2011; Novelli & Smith, 2011; Novelli et al., 2017; Pherali, 2016; Selenica, 2018). The multi-scalar international commitment to education that one can observe in peacebuilding interventions is to be understood as part of a larger and more substantial change (one may say erosion) of the symbiotic relationship that historically exists between the state and education as mentioned in the previous section. Moreover, such erosion is supported and complemented by discursive practices that define post-conflict and conflict-affected states as failed, weak, fragile entities, unable to provide/deliver basic services to their population—and thus being disqualified from sovereignty. Failed states have been conceptualised as a global security risk and terrorists’ safe havens following the 9/11 attacks and the Global War on Terror. This has entailed an incorporation of education in global security agendas as the next section will address.

4 The Incorporation of Education in Counterterrorism Strategies Since the 9/11 attacks and the Madrid and London bombing in 2004 and 2005, respectively, and increasingly following the emergence of ISIS in Syria and Iraq in 2014, terrorism, violent extremism and radicalisation have become key concerns for international and national agendas and policies (Kundnani & Hayes, 2018). In the UN Plan of Action to Prevent Violent Extremism, the former UN Secretary-general states that: [t]here is no single pathway to violent extremism. But we know that extremism flourishes when human rights are violated, political space is shrunk, aspirations for inclusion are ignored, and too many people—especially young people—lack prospects and meaning in their lives. (UN, 2016)

With the aim of fostering dialogue and preventing conflict, the Plan has included ‘Education, skills development and employment’ as one of the seven action areas (UN, 2016). According to the UN Plan, education can efficiently counter terrorism and violent extremism by equipping students with cognitive skills that underpin critical thinking, behavioural and socioeconomic skills for peaceful existence, tolerance and respect for human rights, as well as by building educator’s capacities to support this educational agenda for CVE (UN, 2016). Education’s incorporation in CVE and counter-radicalisation is the result of the shift from terrorism to radicalisation and violent extremism and the growing incorporation of soft-societal measures that target

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social actors and sectors such as education, youth and local minority communities within the EU and beyond (Novelli, 2017; Ragazzi, 2017; Selenica, 2019). Scholars have started to stress the increased securitisation of education in conflictaffected and fragile contexts as seen by education’s incorporation in national and international strategies of counter-radicalisation, counterterrorism and countering violent extremism (Novelli, 2017; Selenica, 2019). A number of critical scholars have emphasised that the incorporation of social sectors and actors such as education, teachers, students, health workers and minority communities within EU and EU member states policies has come as a result of the shift towards anticipatory and pre-emptive logics of prevention of radicalisation and violent extremism processes following a series of terrorist attacks in EU capitals (Heath-Kelly, 2012; Ragazzi, 2017). According to them, youth and education are seen at the same time as ‘at risk’ or ‘risky’ categories and sectors for radicalisation and at the forefront of counterradicalisation and CVE responses (Heath-Kelly, 2012; Ragazzi, 2017). This has a myriad of potentially detrimental effects on both (Heath-Kelly, 2012; Ragazzi, 2017). These policies are now being localised and incorporated in international and national strategies of CVE and counter-radicalisation in conflict-affected and postconflict countries regardless of whether and what type of radicalisation and violent extremism is present. However, little research has addressed this recent development as most of the research has focused on the European context. The chapter seeks to fill this gap in the section ‘Education and the extremist threat, 2014–2019’. In order to understand shifts in the priorities of international and national actors in education reform and assistance in Kosovo, one needs to go beyond the national context and locate those changing priorities within broader shifts and changes in international peace and security agendas.

5 The Kosovo Whirl: The Relationship Between Education and Conflict The Kosovo conflict has always been defined as an intractable one (Strazzari, 2008), whose genealogy has been characterised by a manipulation of and a controversy over different ‘national historical truths’ (Dogo, 1999). The inter-ethnic divide between Kosovo Albanians and Kosovo Serbs considered as the conflict root has been tackled through the promotion of a form of multiculturalism and protection of minority rights which has been translated on the ground in territorial decentralisation along ethnic lines4 (Randazzo & Bargués Pedreny, 2012, p. 27). Kosovo’s education has been historically intertwined with conflict drivers. Education has played a crucial role in the rise and shape of Albanian nationalism. Moreover, the struggle over education and schooling in the Albanian language has represented 4

Under UN legislation, Kosovo’s eight communities (i.e., communities whose members belong to the same ethnic, religious and linguistic group) are Albanians (92 percent), Serbs (4 percent) and then, in lose order, Turks, Bosniaks, Gorani, Roma, Egyptians and Ashkali.

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the primary site of contention between Serbs and Albanians in recent history. In analysing the history of the education/war relationship in the region, education practices seem to have been both constitutive and reproductive of violent and exclusivist discourse. In this context, education has been the root and a proximate cause of the ethno-national conflict (Selenica, 2018). The conflict over Kosovo’s education system during the 1990s dates back to the nationalist campaign inaugurated by Milosevic in 1987, which was finalised with the removal of autonomy and the restriction of political, economic and cultural rights of the Kosovar Albanian community, as well as the mass dismissal of the Kosovar Albanian teaching staff that refused to teach in Serbian. Kosovar Albanians established an organised parallel system of governance, opting for a non-violent form of resistance. In the sphere of education, this meant that most Kosovar pupils boycotted state classes and attended instead parallel schools, which were typically organised in private houses, garages and cellars (Selenica, 2018). During the nineties, the education system became structurally separated along ethnic lines and was divided between a formal Serbian run system that was boycotted by the vast majority of the population, and a tolerated underground and parallel system run by Kosovar Albanians. As the next sections will show, an overall logic of stabilisation and security has underpinned international interventions in the education sector in post-conflict Kosovo. Despite ‘stabilisation’ featuring in the titles of four recent UN missions, there is no UN-wide interpretation of the term (Gidens, 2019). The UK Stabilisation Unit has defined stabilisation as an approach: [w]hich is designed to protect and promote legitimate political authority, using a combination of integrated civilian and military actions to reduce violence, re-establish security and prepare for longer-term recovery by building an enabling environment for structural stability. (Gidens, 2019, p. 50)

Intrinsic to this definition, as well as other definitions provided by the US, is an increasing focus on security and structural stability as pre-conditions to long-term peace. The post-conflict period is divided into two phases not only for analytical purposes but also because each phase respectively is underpinned by a peculiar logic that reflects broader changes and shifts in the global order and in international agendas of intervention. During the first period between 1999 and 2013, the international community sought to rebuild an education system based on the values of multiculturalism and liberal peace. I argue that this was in line and indeed reflected the main template of intervention in conflict-affected and post-conflict promoted by the UN and the broader international community between the 90s and the early 2000s, i.e., the liberal peace agenda. While an attempt to engineer multicultural liberal peace through education was initially advocated by the UN mission and other international actors outside the mission, for stability and security reasons, international actors involved in education reform soon accepted the de-facto ethnically segregated education system that came to be established after the war as a result of local nationalist agendas. In other words, the UN and the broader international community clashed not only with local nationalist actors but also with its other priorities and agendas that in Kosovo

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as elsewhere in the nineties had more to do with stability and security than peace and social transformation. During the second period between 2014 and 2019, the international community shifted the focus towards youth and education for countering violent extremism and radicalisation. This reflected broader changes in the logics and agendas of international interventions that, since 9/11 and more sharply after the Madrid and London bombings in 2004 and 2005, have increasingly focused on conflict-affected contexts as well as EU states on tackling terrorism, violent extremism and radicalisation (Heath-Kelly, 2012). The international community in Kosovo, while still maintaining a focus on minority rights, has increasingly focused on the prevention of violent extremism and radicalisation processes, following the departure, since 2014, of approximately 400 Kosovo Albanian foreign fighters to join ISIS forces in Syria and Iraq. During this period and in line with EU and UN policies, an ‘all-societal approach’ in fighting terrorism, violent extremism and radicalisation has entailed the conceptualisation of social sectors and actors such as education and students as ‘at risk’ of radicalisation and ‘risky’ categories within radicalisation dynamics but also as potentially at the forefront for the prevention of violent extremism and radicalisation (Heath-Kelly, 2012; Novelli, 2017; Ragazzi, 2017). In both phases, international actors have targeted the education sector with superficial strategies and solutions to what were identified as the main problems while avoiding to address substantial and structural inequalities that underpinned both the conflict and the radicalisation of young foreign fighters.

6 The Reconstruction and Reform of Education in the Post-conflict Phase In the aftermath of the war, the UN administration focused both on infrastructural reconstruction and long-term reform of education (Søbjerg, 2006). The parallel system of education—a centrepiece of Albanian resistance to Milosevic’s repressive regime—was replaced with the newly established UNMIK’s Department of Education and Science [DoES] (Sommers & Buckland, 2004, p. 35). The reform phase was launched by DoES through the articulation of a strategic initiative called Developing an Education System for Kosovo (DESK), which was composed of international and local multi-stakeholder working groups that addressed systemic and strategic educational issues (Selenica, 2018). The international community considered Kosovo’s educational legacy problematic, therefore in need of substantial change (Sommers & Buckland, 2004). Michael Daxner—Principal International Officer of the DoES and Principal Administrator of the University of Pristina—attracted considerable levels of funding for education, recruited international consultants, and inaugurated the ‘lead-agencies approach’, in which renowned international agencies were assigned core tasks within the education system. UNICEF and UNESCO were in charge of curriculum reform; the World Bank

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focused on quality assurance, management information system support and school decentralisation; the European Commission was in charge of infrastructural reconstruction and vocational training; the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) was in charge of teacher training; the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) on technical and vocational training (TVET) and the Dutch NGO Spark and later OSCE on higher education and minority education. A local education expert distinguished between two different international approaches in education reform: the first was sensitive to the local context and the past legacy, while the second that prevailed was the one enacted by Michael Daxner.5 With the promotion of the ‘lead-agencies’ approach, Daxner ignored and sidelined local capacities.6 Outside the UNMIK structures, there was a multiplicity of international governmental and non-governmental agencies—engaged both as donors and implementing partners—whose roles and functions often overlapped or conflicted. The local Ministry of Education, Science and Technology remained heavily dependent on financial and technical assistance of the international community for more than one decade after the end of the war, in particular on management system capacities, decentralisation programmes, curriculum development, teacher development and quality assurance (UNDP, 2013, pp. 38–39). In the aftermath of the war, the international community’s attempts to build a pluralist and multiethnic society met with the resistance of local, nationalistic agendas: as a result, post-intervention education reforms reinforced ethnical segregation in a reversed way (Nelles, 2006, p. 98). By 2000, most of the Albanian students and teachers moved from the parallel system into government schools, while Serbs across Kosovo moved from the government buildings into building their own parallel system of education supported and funded by Belgrade. The integration of the Serbian community into a unique education system became a politicised issue that has not been resolved yet. Ethnic separation of the education system throughout the nineties and the ethnic war between the two communities made post-conflict segregation also a foreign choice (Kostovicova, 2005).

6.1 Education and Peacebuilding Between 1999 and 2013: Curricula Reform and Education for Minorities At the heart of the UNMIK peacebuilding mission was the objective of managing diversity and difference by building a multicultural state. Difference in Kosovo was institutionalised and protected through a process of decentralisation promoted and supported by the international community: the condition for sovereignty and statehood became the accommodation of claims by distinctive identity groups, which— however—sought payoffs and rewards by avoiding connections, exchange and integration (Monteux, 2006; Randazzo & Bargués Pedreny, 2012). Managing differences 5 6

Interview with local education expert, AAB University, 1 November 2013, Pristina, Kosovo Ibid.

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through decentralisation had a lasting impact on the education system too. In the aftermath of the conflict, the international community focused on two areas of education whose reform was underpinned by the objectives of managing ethnic diversity and fostering a pluralist and multicultural society: curricula reform and education for minorities. With regard to curricula reform, UNICEF took charge of primary curriculum reform through a process funded by several donors such as Japan and the United Nations Human Security Trust Fund (UNICEF and DoES-UNMIK, 2001). The first reform initiative was the new Kosovo Curriculum Framework, based on Western trends of educational development, in particular, the focus on learner-centred approaches (Tahirsylaj, 2013). In 2002, the local Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MEST) took over education reform, including curriculum development, but the role of international actors in the process remained important. MEST has tried to adopt a single curriculum for all Kosovan communities, with translation into different languages. However, the curriculum in Serbian has been drafted but not issued, and there is no record or statistics on the number of Serb pupils and schools of the parallel system, nor is there a strategy of integration of the Serbian parallel system into the Albanian one (OSCE, 2003, 2006, 2009b). One of the most contentious aspects in curricula reform has been the history curriculum, in particular the period between WWII and the war in Kosovo in 1999. Here too, international initiatives sought to address the historical controversies through joint researches and scholars that were, however, met with local resistance (Nelles, 2006). The battle over Kosovo’s history has resulted in competing and exclusivist school curricula (Sommers & Buckland, 2004, p. 39). Much of the conflict over politics and education in Kosovo has been around different and competing interpretations of Kosovo history by Serbs and Albanians (Dogo, 1999). While this was a pressing issue in the early years after the war,7 and it still remains one of the most contentious ones, interviews conducted fourteen years later confirm that history curricula are less contentious than in the aftermath of the conflict.8 An OSCE report argues that while curricula in Kosovo satisfy the educational needs of specific communities, they fail to promote “[m]utual respect, understanding and tolerance” (OSCE, 2009b, p. 24). OSCE concludes that youth from different communities in Kosovo that are being formed in the current education systems will find it difficult to communicate with each other for lack of a commonly understood language and for lack of a non-divisive and shared history (Ibid.). According to Montanaro, “[T]he language barriers, different school curricula and different ways of teaching history, identity and nationhood risk contribute to a worsening of the interethnic divide” (2009, p. 12). Indeed, curricula for community-specific ‘national’ subjects for the most vulnerable Roma, Ashkali, Egyptian, Gorani, Kosovo Croat and Kosovo Montenegrin communities have not been developed yet (OSCE, 2009b, p. 1). 7

Sommers and Buckland (2004) highlight that the issue of history was a constant theme in the interviews that were conducted with Kosovar Albanians and Serbs in 2004. 8 Interview with head of curriculum section, MEST, 12 November 2013, Pristina, Kosovo.

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Educational access for minority groups was heavily affected by the bifurcation of education during the 1990s—between a formal Serbian system and an Albanian underground—and its extreme fragmentation. UNMIK aimed to develop an education system based on interactive methodologies and new curricular topics that could promote equitable access and mutual understanding among different ethnic groups. For the purpose of multiethnic schooling, in the aftermath of the war, UNMIK organised shift schemes or shared facilities, targeting particularly the Serbian and Albanian communities. However, this solution did not work either because of the lack of will on the part of the two communities to attend the same schools or for lack of physical security (Nelles, 2006, p. 102). OSCE, USAID and the Dutch NGO Spark have been particularly active in the field of higher education for minorities.9 Most of the international organisations involved in multicultural projects for education10 have addressed one or more education issues of a given community without a comprehensive and trans-community approach. In 2011, MEST supported by the OSCE Higher Commissioner for National Minorities (HCNM), has been developing two textbooks designed for boosting intercultural education: a textbook for learning Albanian as second language for minorities’ students and a textbook for civic and intercultural education (OSCE, 2009a). While the Bosnian, Turkish, Roma, Ashkali and Egyptian (RAE) communities are partially integrated within the Kosovo system of education, Gorani and Serb communities are not integrated at all (OSCE, 2009a). This suggests that communities seem to be moving gradually on their own separate ways (OSCE, 2009a). The respect for the rights and interests of minority communities has led to the promotion of decentralisation policies along ethnic lines with consequences felt in the fragmented and decentralised education system(s). A fragmented and decentralised education has hampered interaction between different communities and thus the integration of minority groups.

6.2 Education and the Extremist Threat, 2014–2019 Countering terrorism, countering violent extremism (CVE) and addressing the foreign fighters phenomenon have become central concerns for international donors and local actors in the Western Balkans since the rise of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq in 2014. This shift in focus has also been reflected in Kosovo, in which education together with youth has been targeted by strategies and policies countering violent extremism and radicalisation (Selenica, 2019). This comes as a result of an increased participation of Balkan foreign fighters, in particular from Bosnia Herzegovina and Kosovo in the wars in Iraq and Syria (Augestad Knudsen, 2017). It is estimated that around 400 Kosovo citizens travelled to territories under ISIS 9

Skype interview with former employee with the Dutch NGO Spark, 21 November 2013; Interview with local education expert, AAB University, 1 November 2013, Pristina, Kosovo. 10 Such as OSCE, Council of Europe, US Embassy, and UNICEF.

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rule between 2012 and 17, most of whom were young males belonging to the 20– 30 age group (Kursani, 2015, 2018). The peculiar socioeconomic and demographic features of Kosovo society—a substantial number of male youth in conditions of poverty and marginalisation, 43 percentage of the population below 25 years old, youth unemployment at around 57.7 percentage and low levels of education—have been identified as among the main factors for radicalisation in Kosovo (European Commission, 2016). International and bilateral donors such as the US, Italian and Dutch embassies, the EU, USAID, British Council, UNDP, IOM and OSCE, among others, have funded or implemented projects ranging from the creation of referral mechanisms to projects supporting women, media, youth, civil society etc.11 Several interviews confirmed that the main focus of international actors in the coming years is expected to be on youth.12 While a recent study has pointed out to the fact that education does not seem to be a significant driver for radicalisation in Kosovo (Kursani, 2018),13 poor education has been identified by many donors and national authorities as a driving factor underpinning trajectories of radicalisation and violent extremism. Depending on the different stakeholders dealing with the issue, it is either the level of education or its quality that matters. According to recent data, around 80 per cent of Kosovo foreign fighters have finished secondary school, eight per cent elementary school and nine per cent have a university degree (Kursani, 2018). Most of the international actors engaged in education for CVE projects consider radicalisation a process driven by a religious identity and education a space where such identity is being shaped and thus the arena where it can also be addressed and prevented. The identification of education as a key sector of intervention is clearly seen in the Kosovo’s Strategy on Prevention of Violent Extremism and Radicalization Leading to Terrorism 2015–2020 whereby 40 per cent of its activities are envisaged to be implemented by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (Office of the Prime Minister, 2015). More specifically, education, together with social services, security intelligence and public administration, is a key sector for early identification of radicalisation, particularly, among young men (Ibid., p. 19); an attractive alternative to radicalism and an arena for critical engagement against violent extremism (Ibid., p. 20); as well as a key sector for the promotion of tolerance and the provision 11

Author’s interview with researcher 2, Kosovo Centre for Security Studies, 28 September 2018; Author’s interview with an investigative journalist, Prishtina, 24 September 2018; Author’s interview with researcher 1, Kosovo Centre for Security Studies, 26 September 2018; Author’s interview with a local official working with an international organization active in CVE, 26 September 2018. 12 Author’s interview with an investigative journalist, Prishtina, 24 September 2018; Author’s interview with researcher 1, Kosovo Centre for Security Studies, 26 September 2018; Author’s interview with researcher 2, Kosovo Centre for Security Studies, 28 September 2018. 13 Kosovo foreign fighters “have slightly more advanced levels of education than the average Kosovo citizen. Yet their average socio-economic condition is below the Kosovo average; they tend to be poorer and seem to have had less access to opportunities to reach good standards of living compared to the average Kosovo citizen. […] the unemployment rate among Kosovo originating foreign fighters is double than the Kosovo average” (Kursani, 2018, p. 3).

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of global knowledge on religion, among others (Ibid., p. 23). The Plan envisages the development of awareness sessions and campaigns in and through schools, the establishment of safe environments for sensitive questions and the improvement of psychology and pedagogy services in schools, particularly in the most radicalised areas (Ibid., p. 22). Moreover, a number of key educational activities are envisaged in the implementation plan, making the sector a crucial one against violent extremism and radicalisation.

7 Conclusions The case study of education reform in post-war Kosovo analysed for this chapter suggests that contemporary processes of state and nation-building in conflict-affected global peripheries are shaped and moulded by substantial forms of external and international intervention, in which practices of sovereignty and statehood are continuously supervised and negotiated. The perspective that this chapter adopts is that of looking at the local and the global as mutually constituted ontologically, epistemologically and methodologically. The chapter argues that the same approach needs to be adopted when studying traditionally national sectors such as education. The analysis proposed here suggests that the borders between what is internal from what is international are continuously shifted and negotiated through processes of globalisation, international interventionism and new forms of war, peace and state making. Education in newborn states is shaped by a variety of international and local actors and the outcome is often a compromise or a clash between different visions and agendas of education as the case study analysed here shows. In the two empirical instances analysed, education is underpinned by a stabilisation logic and shaped by global and international dynamics, agendas and policies for maintaining peace and security. Far from being the exception of the post-war phase, aspects of exogeneity and hybridity in the governance of education reform have become the norm. The governance of education reform, increasingly beyond and above state sovereignty, suggests that education, once historically central to national building and state formation, is increasingly bound to international imperatives and interests. Processes such as globalisation, war and international interventions along peripheral regions have challenged the basic unit of analysis—i.e., the nation-state. While traditionally, education policies have been developed within the boundaries of the Westphalian state, national policies are increasingly “[a] combination of political forces, social structures, cultural traditions and economic processes entangled in a matrix of intersecting multi-level, multi-scalar (local, national, regional and global) sites and spaces” (Yeates, 2001, p. 637). The simplification of the levels of analysis along the binary and dichotomous split national/international (local/global) is thus a limitation that needs to be overcome (Dale, 2005). The conception of space and scale as used by Robertson (2012), in which the local, regional and global are intertwined and mutually constituted may contribute in such direction. Furthermore, it is

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much needed to adapt the lenses of IR theory by going beyond a certain methodological nationalism and disciplinary parochialism that has characterised much of the existing literatures on war making, state making/unmaking and international interventions in a globalised world (Leander, 2003). Therefore, the incorporation of IR and Area Studies in a dialectical and cooperative framework can deepen our analytical perspectives on the international order and help overcome some of the limits associated with methodological nationalism and disciplinary parochialism. Funding Part of this study was supported by the Kosovo Foundation for Open Society as part of the project ‘Building knowledge of new statehood in Southeast Europe: Understanding Kosovo’s domestic and international policy considerations’.

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Leander, A. (2003). Wars and the un-making of states. Taking Tilly seriously in the contemporary world. In S. Guzzini and Jung, D. Contemporary Security Analysis and Copenhagen Peace Research. London: Routledge. McCandless, E. (2011). Peace dividends and beyond: Contributions of administrative and social services to peacebuilding. United Nations Thematic Review for the Peacebuilding Support Office. Montanaro, L. (2009). The Kosovo Statebuilding Conundrum: Addressing Fragility in a Contested Space. International Alert and Fride Working paper 91, October. Monteux, C. (2006). Decentralization: The new delusion of ethnic conflict resolution? International Journal on Multicultural Societies, 8(2), 162–182. Nelles, W. (2006). Foundations and fractures of Kosovo’s educational system. Towards conflict or peace? In T. B. Knudsen & C. B. Laustsen (Eds.), Kosovo between war and peace. Nationalism, peacebuilding and international trusteeship (pp. 96–115). Routledge. Novelli, M., & Smith, A. (2011). The role of education in peacebuilding. A synthesis report of findings from Lebanon, Nepal and Sierra Leone. UNICEF. Novelli, M., Higgins, S., Ugur, M., & Valiente, O. (2014). The political economy of education systems in conflict-affected contexts: A rigorous literature review. Final Report, April. Novelli, M., Lopes Cardozo, T. M. A., & Smith, A. (2017). The 4R framework: Analysing education’s contribution to sustainable peacebuilding with social justice in conflict-affected contexts. Journal of Education in Emergencies, 3, 14–43. Novelli, M. (2017). Education and countering violent extremism: Western logics from south to north? Compare, 47(6), 835–851. https://doi.org/10.1080/03057925.2017.1341301 Office of the Prime Minister. (2015). Kosovo’s strategy on prevention of violent extremism and radicalization leading to terrorism 2015–2020. Republic of Kosovo, September. OSCE. (2003). Parallel Structures in Kosovo. Pristina, Kosovo. OSCE. (2006). Parallel Structures in Kosovo 2006–2007. Prishtina, Kosovo. OSCE. (2009a). Mid-term report for the feasibility study on community education in Kosovo. Unpublished executive summary draft. OSCE. (2009b). Kosovo non-majority communities within the primary and secondary educational systems. Department of Human Rights and Communities, Prishtina, Kosovo. Paris, R. (1997). Peacebuilding and the limits of liberal internationalism. International Security, 22(2), 54–89. https://doi.org/10.2307/2539367 Paris, R. (2004). At war’s end: Building peace after civil conflict. Cambridge University Press. Paris, R., & Sisk, T. (2009). The dilemmas of statebuilding: Confronting the contraddictions of postwar peace operation. Routledge. Pherali, T. (2016). Education, cultural revolution, reproduction and peacebuilding. In O. P. Richmond, S. Pogodda, & J. Ramovic (Eds.), Dimensions of peace: Disciplinary and regional approaches (pp. 296–313) Palgrave Macmillan. Ragazzi, F. (2017). Students as Suspect. The challenges of counter-radicalisation policies in education in the Council of Europe member states. Interim report. Council of Europe. Strasbourg. Randazzo, E., & Bargués Pedreny, P. (2012). Peace-building and the loop of liberal multiculturalism: The Case of Kosovo. The Western Balkans Policy Review, 2(2)(Summer/Autumn), 27–47. Richmond, O. (2011). A post-liberal peace. Routledge. Robertson, S. L. (2012). Researching global education policy: Angles In/On/Out... In A. Verger, M. Novelli, & H. K. Altinyelken (Eds.), Global education policy and international development. New agendas, issues and policies. Continuum. Robertson, S. L., & Dale, R. (2015). Towards a ‘critical cultural political economy’account of the globalising of education. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 13(1), 149–170. https://doi. org/10.1080/14767724.2014.967502 Rose, P. M. (2007). Supporting non-state providers in basic education service delivery. Paper commissioned by DFID Policy Division, Brighton: Consortium for Research on Educational Access, Transitions and Equity (CREATE). Research Monograph 4/2007.

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Political Ecologies of Landmines in the Borderlands of Myanmar Francesco Buscemi

Abstract This chapter deals with a question foregrounded by historian Willem van Schendel in his seminal 2002 article “Geographies of Knowing, Geographies of Ignorance”: how do arms and associated regulatory practices reshape the geometries of authority and power in borderlands? The rich literature on borderlands has deployed van Schendel’s insights to respatialise areas and states but has devoted scant attention to such questions. Drawing from “new materialist” scholarship in IR and the concept of scale in political geography, the chapter argues that fluid and fractionally coherent combinations of weapons as technical objects, rationalities, and techniques of arms control reproduce multiple scales of territorial authority and struggles over scaled modes of governing violence in borderlands. Such struggles constantly reconfigure the territorial arenas of authority on violence at the edge of the state. Delving into the processes and practices of “making” and controlling the “landmine”, different sociopolitical orders confront themselves through rationalities, techniques and practices of humanitarian arms control via which they navigate/jump across scales, forge new ones, or mobilise multi-scalar alliances. Different types of “dead” and “alive” landmines nonetheless defy these attempts at rescaling territorial authority over violence by acting in unforeseen manners at the scale of their own ecologies of violence.

The following chapter was partially published in the Special Issue of the Italian Political Science Review titled “Reaching for allies? The dialectics and overlaps between International Relations and Area Studies in the study of politics, security and conflicts”), with the title “Ecologies of ‘Dead’ and ‘Alive’ landmines in the borderlands of Myanmar”, https://www.cambridge.org/core/ journals/italian-political-science-review-rivista-italiana-di-scienza-politica/article/abs/ecologiesof-dead-and-alive-landmines-in-the-borderlands-of-myanmar/53C0BD24C57B7107385D4383 A44D978C. F. Buscemi (B) Piazza San Giovanni in Monte, Bologna, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. D’Amato et al. (eds.), International Relations and Area Studies, Contributions to International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39655-7_8

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1 Introduction Since the early stages of his attempt to build a scholarly enterprise to respatialise “areas” and area studies, Willem van Schendel gave particular prominence to questions concerning weapons (Van Schendel, 2002, 663–664). Understanding spatial categories not as ontologically given, static and timeless containers, but as produced by and productive of social processes, he aimed to illuminate the geographies of knowing and geographies of ignorance that are consolidated through the particular metaphor and scale of analysis deployed by Area Studies. The sorts of questions he posed—questions that still remain at the heart of the dialectics and overlaps between Area Studies and International Relations (IR) this special issue disentangles—were above all ontological and epistemological in nature: how are areas, including states, imagined? How are they lived? How are specific grids of knowledge and practice structured in a way that shapes areas into supposed “heartlands” and “borderlands”, cores and peripheries, which are then accordingly studied, marginalised or ignored? To deal with these questions, van Schendel’s work first and foremost disputed the idea that border areas of states or “world regions” would necessarily hold stronger links to their putative cores than to adjoining “peripheral” zones (2002). The aspiration to move analytically across and beyond borders, although without painting them as transparent entities, transpired in his distinct conceptualisation of borderlands as “process geographies” traversed by a boundary line, rather than as areas of one nation-state adjoining it (Baud & van Schendel, 1997, 216). Weapon transfers from the Myanmar-Thai border to the bustling port-town of Cox’s Bazar and further into the Indian–Myanmar–Bangladeshi tri-border areas, with their longstanding armed rebellions and politico-economic complexes, were taken as clear examples of academic ignorance concerning how flows (of things and people) reshape localities; how they reterritorialise the state and other geographical scales of authority, empowering some and disempowering others (van Schendel, 2002, 664). Albeit mostly for exemplificatory purposes, in his 2002 article “Geographies of knowing, geographies of ignorance” Willem van Schendel foregrounded a central question: how do weapons, weapon flows, and regulatory practices associated with them reshape the geometries of authority and power in borderlands (ibid)? This chapter focuses on that question. In the last decades, a rich transdisciplinary literature has approached borderlands both as heuristic devices to explore the (un)making of political configurations at the supposed state margins and as spatial formations with specific features. Borderlands can be seen as material spaces with no particular heartland, that are constantly constructed, shifting, unstable, incomplete, and that vary across geographical scales (Abraham & van Schendel, 2005; Scott, 2009; Sadan, 2013). In fact, borderlands can simultaneously be borderlines with space adjoining them; vast territories on both sides of borderlines characterised by different regulatory systems; spatial mechanisms and resources centred around the border that at once divide and unite political entities; marginal spaces and sites that nonetheless remain central to the reproduction of state (b)orders; or territorialised nodes of transnational connection and flows (Goodhand, 2011; Korf & Raeymaekers,

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2013; Watts, 2018). They are spaces on the edge of the state that are territorialised via struggles over geography at different scales and where states’ political authority and monopoly of the means of violence and arms are finite and contested (Korf & Raeymaekers 2013). Yet, the literature on borderlands has devoted scant attention to weapons-related questions notwithstanding their centrality. The few contributions that look at weapons in this ambit do so through two main, at times concomitant, frameworks. First, as technological factors that determine social orders and power relations (Mkutu, 2008; Simala & Amutabi, 2005). Second, subordinate objects can contribute to determining social authority and power but that remain at the service of human agencies and relations, whether in constructivist or more positivist terms (Sagawa, 2010, 2018). By focusing on the weapon in a deterministic manner and/or privileging human actors, both views tend to flatten the geographical resolutions at which weapons are materially and discursively made and controlled, often risking to reify or dichotomise scales of action and actors, while also overdetermining or neglecting the role of arms in shaping the geometries of authority and power in borderlands. Through empirical case study research and a transdisciplinary stance between IR and political geography, I provide a different view. I contribute to the literature on borderlands by describing how weapons become a battlefield for the regulation of authority over violence and make a difference in shaping a politics of scale. The chapter’s central argument is that weapon assemblages made of human and nonhuman entities reproduce scales of territorial authority over violence and struggles over scale in borderlands. Drawing on new materialist approaches developed in IR (for example Bourne, 2012; De Larrinaga, 2016; Graham, 2005; Gregory, 2011), and the concept of scale in political geography (Swyngedouw, 1997), I unpack this argument into the following points. First, weapon assemblages—made of humans, technical objects, and non-human entities—are stabilised into specific configurations via weapons’ technical properties, rationalities and techniques of control. Inserted in such assemblages, weapons are to be seen as technical objects that come from somewhere and show a proclivity to act in unforeseen manners. Second, processes and practices of controlling weapons generate a politics of scale. In political geography scale is understood as a sociopolitical territorial arena, both discursive and material, in which socio-spatial relations of power and authority are contested, negotiated, and regulated (Swyngedouw, 1997, 140–141). Processes and practices of stabilising and controlling weapon assemblages that are performed by a myriad of human and non-human actors constantly rescale authority over arms and violence in the borderlands. On the one hand, they produce and operate at multiple encompassed (but hierarchically not determined) territorial spaces at which authority over weapons and violence is contested, negotiated, and regulated. On the other hand, processes and practices of control reproduce struggles over scaled modes of governing weapons. Third, these struggles of scales and about scale constantly rearticulate the geometries of territorial authority over violence in the borderlands. Rather than looking at borderlands as fixed spatial formations, I delve into the ways that territorial resolutions of authority over violence

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are rescaled at the borderlands as areas on the edge of the state without any monopoly of violence. The chapter develops an ethnographically situated analysis of encounters between explosive items, the participants to action linked to them, and the subjects and spaces involved. To this end, it deploys a double embedded case study since it looks at a specific weapon—i.e. explosive devices—in Ta’ang areas of the extended borderlands of Shan State, Myanmar.1 Here I find that dwellers, village heads, ethnic Civil Society Organisations (CSOs), rebel Ethnic Armed Organisations (EAOs) and their units,2 transnational movements, the sit-tat (Myanmar Armed Forces3 ), and International Non-Governmental Organisations (INGOs) perform the explosive device assemblage in different configurations at different territorial scales. They attempt to stabilise it especially via rationalities and techniques of humanitarian arms control. That is to say, discursive and practical fields concerning the protection of a supposed social body made of “civilians” from the effects of weapons proliferation via the regulation or elimination of “inhumane” and “uncivilised” weapons and/or “inhumane” and “uncivilised” weapon-holders. Harnessing rationalities and techniques of humanitarian arms control, they mobilise multi-scalar alliances, navigate and jump across scales, or forge different ones. Nonetheless, the explosive device often defies practices of rescaling authority over violence by acting at the scale of its socio-technical ecologies of violence. In the remainder of the chapter, I invite the reader to bear with me while I unfold what may appear as an unconventional structure. The first part will recount the events and multiple realities of a “landmine” accident. Approaching the device’s explosion from different angles, this part will both (a) introduce the main sets of actors and the various scales at which they operate and (b) suggest the inadequacy of the conceptual approaches adopted by weapons-related contributions in the borderlands literature. 1

The research is based on ethnographic fieldwork, semi-structured and unstructured interviews. I carried out fieldwork in three phases. In September and October 2018, I collaborated with mountain guides in Kyaukme, northern Shan State; from February to July 2019, I was hosted by a humanitarian mine action organisation; while from September to December 2019, I liaised with a Kyaukmebased local CSO. I alternated periods of approximately 10 days–2 weeks moving between Yangon and northern Shan State: here fieldwork entailed also living in mountainous villages and towns in Kyaukme, Hsipaw, and Lashio townships in particular. For two of these periods, I embedded myself with two EAOs: the Palaung State Liberation Front/Ta’ang National Liberation Army (PSLF/TNLA) in the area of Namhsan and Namtu; and the Shan State Progressive Party/Shan State Army-North (SSPP/SSA-N) in Wan Hai. 2 Throughout the text use the acronym “EAO” to refer to rebel movements. Yet it should be noted that, since the latest coup d’état of February 1st, 2021, some rebel movements in Myanmar prefer to refer to themselves as Ethnic Revolutionary Organisations (EROs) in order to take distance from the previous politico-military conjuncture marked by the National Ceasefire Agreement (NCA) and related processes throughout 2015–2021. 3 The Myanmar Armed Forces refer to themselves with the name Tatmadaw, where the suffix-daw confers to it an elevated institutional/royal status in reference to the kingdoms of the Bamar dynasties. Many commentators have suggested instead to use the Burmese word sit-tat, which translates as “military force” or “armed group”, in order to employ a more neutral language in line with the widespread opposition to the military regime.

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The second part instead will foreground a different viewpoint concerning the accident: that of the explosive device itself. It will dive into the processes of making the “landmine”, exploring techniques and practices of controlling the explosive device and the ensuing politics of scale.

2 Explosive Realities of the Borderlands Kyaukme is a bustling trading town in Northern Shan State, Myanmar (Fig. 1). The homonymous township and district state administrative territories straddle the Mandalay-Muse Road which carries the bulk of the overland trade of the country and connects it to China. The town is located near the strongholds of the Ta’ang rebel movement PSLF/TNLA—just south of the Myanmar–China border, in the mountains between Namhkan, Namhsan, and Namtu townships. It is populated by various armed actors: the sit-tat maintains several important garrisons here; people’s militia forces are also present in some villages; and many other rebel movements operate at these latitudes—such as the two Shan ethnonational organisations of the Revolutionary Council of Shan State/Shan State Army-South (RCSS/SSA-S) and SSPP/ SSA-N. Especially since 2011–14, Kyaukme township and district have been seriously affected by increased landmine contamination in connection to the reignition of longstanding armed conflicts. During fieldwork in these areas in October 2019, an informant recounted the story of a landmine explosion occurred north of the town.4 Walking on the path that she used every day to reach the local market, a woman had been hit by a landmine. After the explosion, it was quite a while before anybody found her lying on the ground. A local CSO with connections in the village had been alarmed and had arranged her transportation to the nearest hospital, a clinic about a four-hours away from the explosion site. Next to the path was a tea plantation (Fig. 2). Reaching altitudes of 1200/1500 m, in fact, the slopes of the mountains north of Kyaukme are dotted with tea bushes—an ecological trait they share with the broader region. The portions of the Northern Shan State borderlands west/north-west of the highway are often referred to as “Tea Land”: an expression that Ta’ang socio-political movements have used to draw connections between the historic role of their communities in cultivating and trading tea and aspirations for increased politico-territorial autonomy in these mountainous areas. The expression though is at times rejected by the PSLF/ TNLA. Spatially speaking, “Tea Land” is seen as a territorially reductive scale that, by metaphorically referring only to Ta’ang areas where tea is cultivated in Shan north, could negatively impact PSLF/TNLA’s broader ethnoterritorial claims and territorialisation attempts in Shan State. As news about the explosion spread in the following days, work in the tea fields dropped. Some workers left or lost their jobs, and people stopped using that path to go to the market. Another more circuitous path 4

Interview with CSO member operating in Kyaukme Township, Kyaukme, 8.10.2019; interview with humanitarian worker, Yangon, 17.12.2019.

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Fig. 1 Kyaukme town (all photographs in this chapter © the author)

started to be used, although it would take an additional hour and a half to reach the market from the woman’s village. In order to pay medical expenses, a CSO active in northern Shan State launched a fundraiser. Yet, the circumstances of the explosion were hazy. Most probably the landmine had been freshly laid, since other people used to take the very same path on a daily base and had used it shortly before, but no incident had occurred. Nobody knew of military activity in the area of her village and across that path, so nobody could really tell whether one of the EAOs operating there or the sit-tat had laid the mine. What kind of landmine or explosive device was that? Why had it been emplaced on a walking path so often used by dwellers

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Fig. 2 Tea bushes on the hills north of Kyaukme

and workers? To what aim? These and other aspects of the explosion had remained unclear. Landmines or explosive devices with their components and mechanisms, walking paths, local markets, medical clinics, tea fields on hilly slopes, livelihood means and everyday life practices, local and regional CSOs, voluntary fundraisings, units of different armed rebel movements, sit-tat military troops, their camps, posts, or bases: the scenery that unfolds hand-in-hand with the story of the explosion tells us something about what weapons in the borderlands of Northern Shan State are and how they are (un)controlled. Disparate materials and entities are included or associated among the elements of the story: some of which may be more evident, closer and more immediate in time and space, some of which may be farther away although no less relevant indeed. The landmine accident illustrates a “local” composition in which multiple scales are being reproduced, drawn together by the mine explosion. But how is this “local” (dis)order being shaped and distributed? Paraphrasing Cresswell, as we seek to understand the landmine accident in the mountainous areas of Kyaukme and the borderlands’ geometries of authority on violence, the questions we ask must show us the paths in and out of them, the connections between these places and “the rest of the world(s)” (Cresswell, 2004, 41). To gain some initial clues, I will decompose and recompose how different configurations of the weapon assemblage come to be enacted by different sets of actors operating at different scales (Law, 2008). Drawing a parallel between the different realities of

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the explosion and predominant conceptual approaches in the borderlands literature’s niche on weapons, I will subsequently touch upon the inadequacies of the latter.

2.1 Explosive Reality One Civilians are greatly affected by the use of landmines by multiple ethnonational rebel movements or the Myanmar army. Landmine victims and community-based CSOs often point to the sit-tat and rebel movements as those responsible, but the ways that civilian actors cope with landmine contamination and blame EAOs are contingent upon different dynamics. EAOs hardly have extended, full-blown control on self-designated ethnonational territories but maintain areas of influence and articulate their territory in brigade, battalion, and unit tiers. Some keep nodes of fixed bases, camps, and posts on top of the hills and inside/proximate to villages, others instead remain territorially mobile. In village areas, landmines are to be found in the tea fields or on the top of the hills. In fact, tea fields are usually located on the mountain slopes and provide direct access to the top, where most units’ positions are located. Two main kinds of paths run across and connect villages, fields and other places on these mountains: primary roads, some of which are dirt and others paved; and so-called “farmers’ paths”, i.e. the secondary, more hidden, tracks through which farmers move or access tea fields. The latter offer also more cover for roaming armed units, in turn heightening the likelihood of hosting explosive devices, even though EAOs battalion and brigade commands impose a ban on use in civilian areas. Civilians’ positionalities and everyday lives are a changing kaleidoscope of experiences. Sit-tat or EAO authorities at different tiers may order villagers not to venture into certain areas, yet their livelihoods depend on access to specific locations—the forest, the market, the tea field or paths. Some dwellers in affected villages have coped with landmine contamination through occasional and non-standardised practices, by demarcating some spots or areas with informal techniques and signs, circulating information, or instructing each other among villages. Heads of villages—non-state local authorities normally elected by village communities—play a delicate role as mediators between different actors entangled in the use and control of landmines (like sit-tat and EAOs local commands, CSOs and NGOs, or other villagers). They thus come under great pressure. Furthermore, following the 2011 instalment of President Thein Sein’s government in Naypyidaw, the initiation of a wave of state-level ceasefire negotiations, and the semi-democratic opening that followed, ethnic CSOs and NGOs have consolidated their role as first responders or as subnational implementers of INGOs’ national humanitarian mine action programmes. The term “civilians” cannot be taken as a reference to any monolithic group. Many different ethnonational communities live across these borderlands, and villages are often inhabited by families of Shan, Ta’ang, or Bamar nationality each with their imaginative geographies (Gregory, 1995). Communities can often be connected to ethnonational rebel movements, due to active involvement or because relatives or

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acquaintances take part in them. This does not necessarily mean they fully support the conduct of EAOs though. On the one hand, in village areas livelihoods are indisputably affected by armed actors and EAOs’ decades-long wars. On the other hand, rebel movements or local militias have emerged out of long historical socio-political processes and may provide a modicum of security throughout ethnoterritorial geographies (or may be deemed as the lesser of two evils). Blaming one armed actor or another for landmines explosions may depend on individuals or CSOs’ affiliations and experiences, as well as on the specific territorial scales at which they operate.

2.2 Explosive Reality Two Confronted with accusations of landmine use and contamination, ethnonational rebel movements’ leaderships and commanders declare EAOs neither possess nor use landmines and that the mines they have were captured from the sit-tat military-state. They reiterate that throughout ethnonational territories, their troops use “remote control” or “battery” landmines only.5 “Our mines have batteries and unless we activate them, they do not explode” and in any case “we do not plant mines where civilians move”, the leaders of EAOs say talking about mined sites and “civilian” areas in their territories.6 In some circumstances, however, mines use is acknowledged. In EAOs’ ethnonational territories landmines are planted around their posts, camps, bases, and “frontline” positions, especially in so-called EAOs’ “border areas” but, as they note, set up at night and removed in the morning; or emplaced but without locating the battery that would be inserted only in case of ongoing military operations in the surrounding areas; or set up for offensive tactical/strategic reasons only. Rebel movements’ leaderships argue that their men are trained and instructed to make sure landmines are removed in case they do not go off—when used offensively—or in case units leave their positions—when used defensively. Yet, long-distance control is not always ideal: EAOs’ policies and practices unfold in very different manners throughout territorial tiers and village areas. In this sense, the vantage point of combatants and single units illuminates further elements explaining why landmines are deployed and affect communities. Recruitment and induction are often far from being linear and adequate because resources are missing, for instance, or because it is not feasible to undertake training if rebel control areas are too far away or if recruitment is carried out while units are on the move. At the same time equipment, material, and weapons are not always so well-functioning and reliable and this may result in unexpected or unplanned performances and outcomes at landmines’ local ecologies. Although seemingly contradictory, rebel movements’ declarations should not be taken as pure façade statements. They should be better understood as fragments 5

Interview with TNLA’s 3rd Secretary General, Namhsan Township, 4.11.19; interview with SSPP/ SSA officer and Foreign Affairs representative, Lashio, 12.11.2019. 6 Ibid.

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of rationalities and techniques of humanitarian arms control harnessed to mould relations of authority and scaled modes of governing vis-à-vis populations across EAOs territories as well as international mine action practice across the borderlands. Around the second half of the 2000s, in concomitance with the slow opening up of the country, several armed movements signed unilateral deeds of commitment for a total ban on mines and cooperation on international mine action as part of the Swissbased INGO Geneva Call’s global programmes. Consonantly, often EAOs point to their efforts in clearing certain contaminated areas and stress their responsibility and entitlement concerning demining their ethnonational territories once the conflict will end.

2.3 Explosive Reality Three While EAOs blame the sit-tat or each other, the Naypyidaw military-state apparatuses blame rebel movements for explosive device contamination in Myanmar. EAOs’ use of improvised landmines feeds into sit-tat-centric official narratives depicting some rebels as “terrorists”: by its very nature the weapon assemblage is improvised, one does not know when or how it will go off, and it is even less predictable and more indiscriminate than industrially manufactured mines. Though, behind the condemnation of rebel movements’ use of improvised landmines, or their depiction as terroristic technologically backward weapons, stands the black-boxing of processes and practices of institutionalisation of political authority and territories different from state-sanctioned ones in the borderlands (Bourne, 2012). From a historical perspective, the political and socio-technical possibility for the sit-tat’s Directorate of Defence Industries (Ka-Pa-Sa7 ) and military-state to build and legitimise weapon manufacturing capacities—and, conversely, the impossibility to do so for rebel movements, at least beyond ethnonational scales—undoubtedly speaks of historical processes shaping spatialities of rule and authority (Callahan, 2003, 176–179). Weapons production—negotiated, contested, and regulated at national, regional, and international scales—may be seen as one of the various modular tools of army building that since decolonisation provided the sit-tat also with institutional bases for coercion-intensive political integration and state-building throughout the socially and politically heterogeneous spaces of the borderlands (Ibid). Rebel movements on their part argue that Ka-Pa-Sa industrially manufactured landmines have been systematically used by the sit-tat to grab resourceful or commercially profitable land throughout Myanmar, while negating customary tenure systems and preventing the institutionalisation of territories by authorities other than state ones in the borderlands.8

7

Karkweye Pyitsu Setyoun. Field note and personal conversations with SSPP/SSA-N officer, 11.11.2019, Wan Hai-MongyiaiHsipaw-Lashio.

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2.4 Explosive Reality Four Humanitarian mine action CSOs and NGOs active in Myanmar instead usually refrain from blaming anyone in particular. Locally, nationally, and internationally operating, they issue indistinct calls upon “all parties” to end the use of landmines. Since 2011/2, different humanitarian mine action INGOs have been accredited to start operating in the country. Mine-clearance operations entailing direct involvement of international humanitarian assets, knowledges, and organisations have not been allowed due to a lack of political agreement both in Naypyidaw and the borderlands. INGOs, however, have been employing an array of mine risk education and awareness-raising activities “managing land, resources, and populations at a distance to reduce the risks landmine (pose)” (MacLean, 2016, 85). While some non-technical survey activity—i.e. general surveying of baseline contamination—has been carried out in Northern Shan, Kayin/Karen, Kayah/Karenni, and Kachin State, this has been tangled-up in underlying political and conflict dynamics at subnational, national, and state levels. Institutional capacity building has engaged mostly (if not only) state authorities and some competition has emerged among development and humanitarian organisations trying to secure the driving seat should the door be opened to actual mine-clearance operations/assistance. On the base of a humanitarian stance to arms control, humanitarian mine action actors tend to construct landmines as inherently disruptive “things” generating social crises to be managed. They argue for their removal and call for immediate humanitarian mine action. Yet, this vision often conflicts with different framings of humanitarian mine action as a potential security threat to the local, subnational, and national territorial authority, more radical disarmament rationales, or EAOs’ arguments calling for a necessary rearrangement of Myanmar’s security and defence sector along the logics of federalism.

2.5 Explosive Realities and Borderlands Beyond Substantivist and Instrumentalist Approaches Running through these complex, heterogeneous, explosive realities one may glimpse three main conceptual moments and issues that characterise the few contributions dealing explicitly with weapons in the literature on borderlands (for a review in the ambit of security studies and IR see Bousquet et al., 2017 and 2020). First, the problem of conceiving actors’ agencies and their social relations as autonomous from and unaffected by technologies of violence (Sagawa, 2010, 2018). A so-called “instrumentalist” approach posits the analytical invisibility and neutrality of weapons and implies that what they entail in one place/time they entail in another (Bourne, 2012). Second, the problem of seeing the tools of violence as objects with a technological autonomous capacity to shape socio-political relations and orders (Mkutu, 2008; Simala & Amutabi, 2005)—what has been termed as a “substantivist” approach

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to weapons (Bourne, 2012). And third, the ontological question of what we should understand as “weapon” or “means of violence” in the first place, and how these become “one” (Kuletz, 2001). Through instrumentalist and substantivist approaches, some aspects are made visible while others instead remain overshadowed; none of them and none of the recounted explosive realities alone, help to explore how weapons, flows and struggles over their regulation contribute to shape socio-spatial orders, empowering some and disempowering others in the borderlands. Both substantivist and instrumentalist positions in fact tend to draw a neat line between the world of material objects and the world of socio-political and spatial relations, seeing one as determining the other, and thus placing material things outside politics and space (Bourne, 2012; Law, 2008). They are underpinned by a cartesian dualism between politics/society and technology/materiality (Bourne, 2012). Here power is seen as a substance located at times in the weapon technology and the possibilities endowed by it; at times in the agencies of human actors and/or in the interactions among them. Power becomes a property that travels and is projected from cores to peripheries—from the technological core of weapons, or from that of centres of socio-political power, to the “outside” world. Sticking to the prism of these visions only, one risks losing sight of the fact that, in each of the explosive realities, power is constituted, distributed, and performed via the joint contributions of human and non-human actors that produce and regulate the mine. In the last decades, a transdisciplinary body of literature—often referred to as “new materialism”—has consolidated different approaches to materiality in order to conceptualise the linkages between weapons and socio-political phenomena beyond dualist and deterministic positions (Bourne, 2012; Bousquet et al., 2020; De Larrinaga, 2016; Graham, 2005; Gregory, 2011). Among these, I draw from Michael Bourne’s work on arms control underpinned by material-semiotic’s conceptual approaches (Bourne, 2012). Bourne looked at arms control as the bundle of relationships between technology/weapons and society in toto. He thus proposed an understanding of materiality as the material dimensions/relations of social and political life (Bourne, 2012, 153–155). In other words, how the material—i.e. both the natural and man-made—matters within the constitution and character of sociopolitical relations. Accordingly, one can conceptualise weapons as a collective of relations among different heterogeneous entities, spanning across time and space and all making a difference, that produces violence as an effect. This collective of relations emerges out of—and is constantly performed, hence reproduced, through—a continuous process of composition. Rationalities, techniques, and practices of control deployed to compose and stabilise into a collective the different entities involved become mutually constitutive dimensions of weapons. Relations of power and authority over the material and ideational production and control of weapons are diffused throughout the processes of composition of weapon assemblages. At the same time, they are contested, negotiated, and regulated at and across different scales. Here scale can be conceived as the gradient of geographical resolution at which the weapon assemblage is performed, thought, and regulated by different participants to action (Agnew, 1997, 100). Since scales are never fixed

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pre-given entities but processes of scaling social processes (Brenner, 2004, 8), the explosive device and the rationalities and techniques of control associated with it become terrains to rearticulate scalar arrangements of authority in the borderlands. They become terrains to negotiate authority and shift it so as to be exercised at and across various territorial scales (Ibid; Hong, 2017, 7). The explosive realities illustrated above point to the fact that in making and controlling the mine multiple territorial scales are articulated: heterogeneous local scales; ethnoterritorial scales; military-state territorial scales; subnational, national, and international scales of mine action; as well as landmine territorial ecologies. They also suggest that the changing geographical sets of resolutions into which authority over the device and violence is organised have to do with historically contingent processes and practices of making and controlling landmines. Thus, let us now attend to the ways in which the disparate elements that compose the explosive devices and their governing are complicit in the making, un-making, and remaking of this borderland’s scalar arrangements of authority over violence.

3 …And the Landmine…? What Would It Say in Rebuttal? What is this? A cylindric item, with what looks like a green lever attached to a metal cable. Red and blue plastic wires that fasten the cylinder and the lever to a wooden stick planted into the ground to the side of a road leading to a village on a mountaintop. At first glance, to me this seemed like a craft-manufactured mine…wait…or perhaps an Improvised Explosive Device (IED)? In doubt, I asked: What is this? During an interview, talking about the heavy burden landmines pose for civilians in Myanmar, one of PSLF/TNLA’s general secretaries had replied showing the picture above (Fig. 3)—empirical evidence of what he now defined instead as a “bomb-mining” that RCSS/SSA-S set up on a road leading to a Ta’ang village in Namhkan township.9 With three different possible answers—(1) a craft-manufactured mine; (2) an IED; and (3) a “bomb-mining” that RCSS/SSA-S set up on a road—some months later I turned the same question to a weapons expert: What is this? This is something very interesting and it is something very strange, he replied. It is what we would call a “persistent” mine that does not use battery power but instead relies on a strike detonator only. It has most probably been manufactured through factory-grade process rather than craft assemblage or mere handcraft production and shows “an increase in sophistication of mine manufacture which I am now seeing for the first time (among non-state armed forces in Myanmar)”.10

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Interviews with a TNLA Secretary General, 4.11.2019, PSLF/TNLA temporary mobile HQ, Namhsan township. 10 Personal conversation with a landmines and explosives expert with extensive experience in Myanmar, 30.7.2020.

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Fig. 3 “Persistent” explosive device manufactured through factory-grade machining

Another answer. Four by now. All different, but all about the same thing apparently. A thing that starts to emerge as something that is not reducible to anything else (Law, 2002). So again then, what is this? One could say, as Jairus Grove would reply, that this is “the weaponisation of the throbbing refuse, commerce, surplus, violence, rage, instant communication, population density, and accelerating innovation of contemporary global life” drawing on “(s)urplus weapons, postcolonial injustice, e-waste, nationalist identification, or just rage (…) all drawn into amplification to create the IED and unleash its explosive potentiality” (Grove, 2016, 342, 348). It is not “just” a landmine, but it is also a landmine in a sense. It is not just an IED—because its various components stick together in a different manner than IED’s elements would do—but it is also not an apparent unicum like industrial landmines. It is an explosive fractal coherence, an entity that cannot be reduced to a single determined identity or unit but at the same time maintains a certain coherence. The borderlands of Myanmar are one of the few areas on earth where mines are still produced and also actively used by both state and non-state armed forces (Landmine Monitor, 2019). Those most commonly encountered are industrially manufactured landmines; and craft-manufactured ones, assembled through a cacophony of commercially available and/or military surplus hi-(and less hi-)tech objects. A third category can also be found though, that is mines manufactured through factory-grade processes although not on an industrial scale, i.e. produced through machining and tools rather than merely assembling commercially available pieces together. Each of

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these types of explosive devices offers a window onto flows of materials and ideas, as well as associated regulatory practices. A window onto how such flows and practices have shaped the borderlands into specific localities and territories at different scales and how rationalities and techniques of control are harnessed to rescale authority.

3.1 Ecologies of “Dead” and “Alive” Mines: Technical Objects, Rationalities of Humanitarian Arms Control and Changing Socio-Spatial Relations of Scale Discursive as well as material techniques and practices are deployed by a variety of actors at and across different scales to stabilise and control the heterogeneous collective of the explosive device. It is to the contestations and negotiations emerging through (and over) such techniques and practices that this section turns. The different entities that compose the explosive assemblages organise at different scales and jump from one to another while struggling to assert different territorial arenas and scaled modes of defining and controlling the mines. In the borderlands of Myanmar, craft-produced mines are seldom referred to as IEDs, even by humanitarian mine workers. The ontological identification of craft mines’ explosive fractional coherences as “Improvised-Explosive-Devices” has been primarily consolidated through categorisation efforts begun by the U.S. army in 2006 amid the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for the purpose of identifying, tracing and recording the use of craft-manufactured bombs (Beier, 2011; Grove, 2016). Starting from the 2000s, the presence of various organisations set up at the Thai-Myanmar border by former military personnel (especially from the U.S. army but not only) or militant political movements has contributed to the circulation of military expertise among rebel movements in the Shan State borderlands.11 It is interesting to note that these movements or associations have often included former army personnel with previous active duty in Afghanistan, Iraq, and northern Syria. Based mostly in northern Thailand but operating at larger transboundary scales—from the MyanmarIndia border and Kachin to Karen areas—these volunteer organisations understand themselves as humanitarian services movements. While acting in different manners, at times also with direct armed involvement in self-defined humanitarian relief operations, many of them have delivered training to rebel movements. The humanitarian character of such services has been blurred by an instrumentalist understanding of arms and armed violence which underpins the inclusion of weapons handlingand-use, as well as military, training to members of EAOs. Training participants would then act as humanitarian relief agents and/or trainers-of-trainers back in their respective EAO territories or across the borderlands. Weapons recognition trainings 11

For examples in this regard, see the U.S.-based charity “Shadows of Hope” (www.shadowsof hope.org), or the Italian fascist ‘Casapound’. See L’Espresso, Casapound, Guerra in Birmania, 5 November 2012, L’Espresso, https://espresso.repubblica.it/palazzo/2012/11/05/news/casapoundguerra-in-birmania-1.48032.

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and manuals have been part of these humanitarian assistance activities, in a view to provide EAOs’ members with skills to produce human rights-violations documentation. Education activities and materials part of these trainings have tended to consolidate terminology defining craft-manufactured bombs as IEDs.12 Nonetheless, EAOs resist the definition of “IEDs” and normally refer to explosive devices laid in their territories as “landmines”,13 most often “battery”-mines. The case of PSLF/TNLA is illustrative in this sense. In 2007, with the former Ta’ang rebel movement officially disarmed in northern Shan and its restyled political front gradually initiating a rearmament process at the Thai-Myanmar border (Buscemi, 2021), PSLF’s leadership voluntarily adhered to an international ban on landmines by signing a deed of commitment with the Swiss INGO Geneva Call. In the same years, other EAOs throughout Myanmar were doing the same, in an attempt to boost international recognition amidst the harbingers of the national democratisation process initiated by the military regime with the roadmap to “discipline-flourishing democracy” in 2003.14 The deeds consisted of a unilateral declaration—signed by both the political and armed wings of EAOs and undersigned by Geneva Call’s executive president in Geneva (as a witness) and the Government of the Republic and Canton of Geneva (as custodian)—via which the rebel movements decided to abide by international mine action standards and to place themselves under Geneva Call’s international monitoring activities. Clauses of the document made direct reference to a prohibition to use any victim-activated explosive device, drawing from the definition of “landmines” by article 2.1 of the Ottawa treaty. When PSLF eventually reconstituted a Ta’ang armed force (TNLA) and conflict surged due to its gradual reterritorialisation in northern Shan after 2011, a problem arose, as TNLA’s general secretaries clearly recall: At that time we told them (Geneva Call) that for the landmines we could not avoid (to use) them, right…?...because we are still fighting (…) to attack the army, so we use landmines, we cannot avoid. However, we had already committed ourselves that we would not use landmines so that is why we (…) use just the ‘active landmines’, not the ‘dead landmines’. We just use the remote landmines—if you put the battery, it is alive…if you do not put the battery then it is not alive; even (if) you put the battery, if you do not chip the remote, nothing happens. But sometimes, at first (there) was something that got a little bit problem(atic)…like if near the landmine you called with phone, when the phone is ringing it could become a problem, or maybe if one went with the car or motorbike and stood nearby the landmine, when you start the engine sometimes it can go wrong.15

EAOs leaderships jump up to the international arena to legitimise themselves by banning mines in their ethnoterritorial entities at the borderlands and shift down 12

Interviews with Least lieutenant SSPP/SSA-N (who participated in the trainings), 14–16.11.2019, Wan Hai, SSPP/SSA-N headquarters. 13 Myay hmyouq mine . 14

Geneva Call, Three Ethnic Armed Groups from Burma/Myanmar Commit to a Ban on Antipersonnel Mines, 16 April 2007, https://www.genevacall.org/three-ethnic-armed-groups-burmam yanmar-commit-ban-anti-personnel-mines/. 15 Interview with a TNLA Secretary General, 4.11.2019, TNLA temporary mobile HQ, Namhsan township.

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in order to take distance from and consolidate territorial autonomy at the scale of the military-state, which instead notoriously refuses the application of international mine action standards in the country. The international stigmatisation of landmines as barbarous weapons has been crafted through a set of technological deterministic and essentialist logics that worked to parcel off an entity called “landmine” from broader discussions about radical nonviolence and total disarmament (Beier, 2011). This occurred by defining mines as technologically backward because of—one— their technical incapacity to discriminate against humans and—two—the difficulty to separate landmines from their environments. The anthropocentric stance of such views, which deny the machinic character of the mine and its capacity to unpredictably change (Grove, 2016), de-politicised landmines use and extracted such pariah weapon from a larger pool of legitimate “technologically advanced” arms (Enomoto, 2020). Over the years, the sit-tat has refused to access the mine ban treaty adopting a different instrumentalist approach and arguing that it is the indiscriminate use throughout state territory by terrorists and insurgents described as subhuman that constitutes the real problem when it comes to landmines, not landmines use per se. EAOs instead operate to reparcel off the battery mine from the category of landmines. Using the term “battery” mines, EAOs try to distinguish the entities of battery-powered craft-manufactured mines from the category of industrial landmines, and victim-activated bombs more in general, in order to legitimise their use, their users, and their users’ territorial authority. This is not a purely discursive strategy, rather a continuous attempt unfolding by the very practice of manufacturing and deploying the devices. They appropriate the deterministic logics of humanitarian arms control vis à vis victim-activated arms but mould it to argue for the discriminatory capacity and non-persistent character of “battery mines”. The insertion/extraction of batteries and techniques of remote control, as integral dimensions of the explosive device, are argued to unfold the slippery residual ontological space at the interface between industrial landmines, factory-grade ones, and victim-activated IEDs (“dead mines”) on the one hand, and legitimate weapons on the other. In other words, “active” battery mines are argued to be discriminatory and not environmentally embedded, unlike victim-activated landmines. In EAOs’ ethnoterritorial entities, it is argued, there are no “landmines” as such other than those laid by the sit-tat military-state trying to assert an illegitimate, broader but not hierarchically higher, territorial authority over the borderlands. Yet, shifting down to the territorial ecologies of the device, it is not so simple to insert/extract batteries, remove emplaced mines, or remotely control them. Like any other weapon technology, “active mines” combine into fluid entities that do more than it was expected by EAOs. In this sense, they are as indiscriminate and environmentally embedded as industrial landmines. Due to the very process of composition and how the elements come to co-constitute with each other, they become inherently integrated (more than one but less than many (Law, 2002). Removing and reinserting batteries at ease, once craft mines have been laid, would intervene in the ecological niche of the arm. They cannot be hibernated and then exhumed at will as EAOs claim. Likewise, radio or other kinds of interferences can alter the environment and trigger them. Battery mines’ persistency becomes contingent upon different compositions.

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Depending on how the terrain, elements, or tree canopy combine, the battery can last shorter or longer. Equally, if it sits in water, it is cheap, or poorly assembled, it may stop functioning. Charges could be eaten by ants. Persistent or so-called “dead” mines instead integrate differently (Fig. 4). Manufactured through machining and factorygrade techniques, they do not need battery power and employ a strike detonator. However, whatever the type, wooden sticks used to set them up deteriorate and fall, heavy rainfalls and landslides move mines around. Such mixed vibrant combinations are both generated by and generative of ecological niches. In this sense, landmines in Myanmar are the quintessence of bomb-mine, because one does not know with precision what they are, how many, and where they are: a largely unknown and dispersed contamination of largely unknown and dispersed technical objects. Explosive devices are inherently geographical, and a certain resonance exists between them and the environment. They appear to be produced by environments and, at the same time, productive of environments. On the one hand, explosive devices are built and distributed throughout the very architecture of the milieus of Myanmar’s borderlands. Discursively they are made to resonate with the environments of unavailability of industrially-produced landmines, humanitarian mine action and landmine bans across ethnonational and international scales; while materially they resonate with those of “ceasefire capitalism” (Woods, 2011) and socio-economic relations of arms production and control between the “centre” and “margins”. On the other

Fig. 4 “Persistent” explosive device set up on a road leading to a Ta’ang village in Namhkan township

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hand, compositions of mines as technical objects and human agency reshape the environments emerging with them in non-standardised ways. They can alter the configurations of familiar geography and reformulate it in mutual relation with their own internal coherence (Grove, 2016, 8). The ways in which these weapons are set, or the ways they act, are not always the same and combine in unpredictable manners. Mines emerge as telluric elements that cannot be easily governed and that defy scaled arrangements of territorial authority over violence acting at the scale of their ecological niches.

4 Conclusion This chapter has addressed the substantivist and instrumentalist frames embraced by contributions dealing with weapons-related questions in the literature on borderlands. Drawing on “new materialist” approaches in IR and the concept of scale in political geography, it has shown how in spaces literally at the edge of the state, where the latter’s monopoly of violence is finite, authority over weapons is always contested and rescaled. Weapon assemblages of human and non-human entities reproduce scales of territorial authority at the borderlands. Processes and practices of stabilising and controlling explosive devices constantly shape scalar arrangements of territorial authority over violence and, in so doing, mould the territorial configurations of borderlands as process geographies that are different at different scales. In the Shan State borderlands, competing systems of territorial authority over violence articulate themselves through practices of combining together and managing technical objects, rationalities, and techniques of control. The landmine becomes a field of struggle for different orders—those of humanitarian INGOs, ethnic- and community-based CSOs, networked “volunteer humanitarian” movements, various EAOs, the sit-tat, and civilian communities—that reproduce heterogeneous local scales, ethnonational and military-state territories, trans-borderland scales, and international ones. Acting across scales, they rearrange the relative importance of such arenas of authority over violence by deploying rationalities of humanitarian arms control that revolve around logics and practices of discrimination/indiscrimination, precision, and preservation of civilian populations and their environments. The power effects of these struggles are not located in the actors themselves, in their interactions, or in the technical objects they mobilise, but diffused throughout heterogeneous entities and their combinations. Describing encounters between explosive items, entities that compose them, and the subjects and spaces they target, landmines have appeared as technical objects with a proclivity to act in unforeseen manners. They are the result of historical comings together of designs, techniques of manufacture, technical characteristics, materials, and defining narratives from different elsewheres. They contribute to profile political and armed actors as backward or “modern”, inform the legitimacy of their struggles, or the status of their spaces through scalar politics of authority and rule. EAOs try to subvert the technologically deterministic logics that condemn landmines as arms incapable of discriminating.

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They do so by embracing this very same logic but navigating it with an argument and practice of technological “advancement”. In fact, practicing the manufacture of battery-powered mines represents an attempt to distance the explosive device from other categories of pariah weapons so as to be able to both harness international mine action processes to legitimise ethnonational territorial scales and continue using explosive devices. Nonetheless, this does not always work out as expected. Keeping the battery mine a discriminate weapon not environmentally embedded is costly, laborious, and not even possible at times. At its territorial scale, the mine acts in unforeseen manners, due to the ways the elements that compose it associate with one another and to how it is integrated with its environments. The explosive device defies discourses and techniques of territorial control projected onto it from other territorial scales. Acknowledgements The author is particularly grateful to all the interlocutors that, by granting their time and knowledge, made the research for this chapter possible, as well as to the interpreters that assisted me in some fieldwork phases. Lastly, a major thanks to Darya Alikhani and Rhea Lazarides whose technical support was key to the completion of this chapter.

References Abraham, I., & van Schendel, W. (2005). Illicit Flows and Criminal Things: States, Borders, and the Other Side of Globalization. Indiana University Press. Agnew, J. (1997). The dramaturgy of horizons: Geographical scale in the ‘Reconstruction of Italy’ by the new Italian political parties, 1992–95. Political Geography, 16(2), 99–121. Baud, M., & Van Schendel, W. (1997). Toward a comparative history of borderlands. Journal of World History, 8(2), 211–242. Beier, M. J. (2011). Dangerous terrain: Re-reading the landmines ban through the social worlds of the RMA. Contemporary Security Policy, 32(1), 159–175. Bousquet, A., Grove, J., & Shah, N. (2017). Becoming weapon: An opening call to arms. Critical Studies on Security, 5(1), 1–8. Bousquet, A., Grove, J., & Shah, N. (2020). Becoming war: Towards a martial empiricism. Security Dialogue, 51(2–3), 99–118. Bourne, M. (2012). Guns don’t kill people, cyborgs do: A Latourian provocation for transformatory arms control and disarmament. Global Change, Peace & Security, 24(1), 141–163. Brenner, N. (2004). New State Spaces. Oxford University Press. Buscemi, F. (2021). The art of arms (not) being governed: Means of violence and shifting territories in the borderworlds of Myanmar. Geopolitics, 28(1), 1–28. Callahan, M. P. (2003). Making Enemies. War and State Building in Burma. Cornell University Press Cresswell, T. (2004). Place. A Short Introduction. Wiley-Blackwell De Larrinaga, M. (2016). (Non)-lethality and war: Tear gas as a weapon of governmental intervention. Critical Studies on Terrorism, 9(3), 522–540. Enomoto, T. (2020). Weapon taboos: Genealogies of pariah weapons. Nihon Keizai Hyouronsha Goodhand, J. (2011). War, peace and the places in between: Why borderlands are central. In M. Pugh, N. Cooper, & M. Turner (Eds.), Whose peace: Critical perspectives on the political economy of peacebuilding (pp. 225–244). Palgrave Macmillan. Graham, S. (2005). Switching cities off: Urban infrastructure and us air power. City, 9(2), 169–193.

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Gregory, D. (1995). Imaginative geographies. Progress in Human Geography, 19(4), 447–485. Gregory, D. (2011). From a view to kill: Drones and late modern war. Theory, Culture & Society, 29, 188–215. Grove, J. (2016). An insurgency of things: Foray into the world of improvised explosive devices. International Political Sociology, 10(4), 332–351. Hong, E. (2017). Scaling struggles over land and law: Autonomy, investment, and interlegality in Myanmar’s borderlands. Geoforum, 82, 225–236. Korf, B., & Raeymaekers, T. (eds.) (2013). Violence on the Margins: States, Conflict, and Borderlands. Palgrave. Kuletz, V. (2001). Invisible spaces, violent places: Cold war nuclear and militarized landscapes. In N. Peluso & M. J. Watts (Eds.), Violent environments (pp. 237–260). Cornell University Press. Landmine & Cluster Munition Monitor. (2019). 2019 Myanmar/Burma country report. Law, J. (2002). Aircraft stories. Decentring the object in technoscience. Duke University Press Law, J. (2008). Actor-network theory and material semiotics. In B. S. Turner (Ed.), The new Blackwell companion to social theory (pp. 141–158). Blackwell. MacLean, K. (2016). Humanitarian mine action in Myanmar and the reterritorialization of risk. Focaal—Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, 74, 83–96 Mkutu, K. A. (2008). Guns and governance in the Rift valley: Pastoralist conflict and small arms. James Currey Sadan, M. (2013). Being and becoming kachin: Histories beyond the state in the borderworlds of Burma. British Academy and Oxford University Press Sagawa, T. (2010). Automatic rifles and social order amongst the Daasanach of conflict-ridden East Africa. Nomadic Peoples, 14(1), 87–109. Sagawa, T. (2018). Arms availability and violence in the Ethiopia-Kenya-South Sudan borderland. History of Global Arms Transfer, 6, 39–44. Scott, J. C. (2009). The art of not being governed: An anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia. Yale University Press Simala, K. I., & Amutabi, I. (2005). Small Arms, cattle raiding, and borderlands. In I. Abraham & W. van Schendel (Eds.), Illicit Flows and Criminal Things: States, Borders, and the Other Side of Globalization (pp. 201–225). Indiana University Press. Swyngedouw, E. (1997). Neither glocal nor local. “Glocalization” and the politics of scale. In K. R. Cox (ed). Spaces of Globalization: Reasserting the Power of the Local (pp. 137–166). The Guilford Press, Ch. 6. van Schendel, W. (2002). Geographies of knowing, geographies of ignorance: Jumping scale in Southeast Asia. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 20, 647–668. Watts, M. J. (2018). Frontiers: Authority, precarity, and insurgency at the edge of the state. World Development, 101, 477–488. Woods, K. (2011). Ceasefire capitalism: Military–private partnerships, resource concessions and military–state building in the Burma-China borderlands. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 38(4), 747–770.

Dyadic Approach and Quantitative Analysis: Easing the Dialogue Between IR and Area Studies Paolo Rosa

Abstract There are two “tribes” that do not communicate very well with each other: these are the quantitative and qualitative scholars in International Relations (IR) (and Political Science in general). The difficult dialogue between these two groups can be extended to the troubled relationship between quantitative IR researchers and Area Studies scholars that, as a rule, prefers qualitative approaches and to draw insights from several disciplines, such as history, cultural studies, economics, geography, literary, and language studies, to elaborate a comprehensive explanation of a single case. The divide is broad and, in many cases, difficult to close. The two groups look at one another with circumspection, attributing the worst negative trait to the opposite party: to produce irrelevant knowledge based on statistical manipulation of trivial (but easily operationalizable) variables without policy relevance (the main accusation to quantitative analysis); to look only at their own backyard, producing not generalizable/cumulative knowledge (the main accusation to Area Studies). Putting aside reciprocal acrimonies, some patterns of cooperation are possible and can be mutually fruitful. [It] can be argued that data-less theorizing is – despite some important exceptions – largely sterile, and that in the absence of empirically observed statistical regularities, little progress on the theoretical front can be expected. (Singer,1968: 2)

1 Introduction International Relations studies have been oscillating between large-N research, in which scholars focus on testing empirical hypotheses on a great number of cases, and small-N (sometimes, single-country) studies that try to understand the behaviour of a particular country. Another tension can be detected between studies that focus on the characteristics of the international system (or regional sub-systems) and studies that P. Rosa (B) School of International Studies, University of Trento, Trento, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. D’Amato et al. (eds.), International Relations and Area Studies, Contributions to International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39655-7_9

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take into account mainly national attributes of a country. In the first case the main risk is to lose the peculiarity of a nation’s foreign policy behaviour, considering all states as billiard balls that react the same way to international stimuli. In the second case, the risk is to elaborate ad hoc explanations for each case that stresses more elements of unicity than similarity. This problem can be observed in a significant way in the analysis of Chinese foreign policy, that alternate country-specific explanation (the “China-is-China-is-China” school) and analyses that consider Communist China as an instance of a broader analytical category: for example, of a rising great power (or a developing state), or an authoritarian regime (or a totalitarian state), whose behaviour can be framed in a general explanation (Dreyer, 2012: Introduction). Between these two opposites, a third way can be devised that tries to reconcile the goal of discovering general pattern of international behaviour (linking independent variable/s and dependent variable/s) with studies more attentive to idiosyncratic factors. Dyadic approach, fundamental in quantitative conflict analyses, can help build some bridges between large-N quantitative International Relations (QIR) and studies based on the understanding of the functioning of a particular region/state/ actor characterized by distinctive political, social, and cultural attributes.

2 A Tale of Two “Tribes” Often quantitative analysis is perceived as too abstract (because it analyses the impact of variables and not the behaviour of actors) and ignores the specificity of the domestic, historical, and cultural environment of actors. Conversely, Area Studies are supposed to have an idiographic approach that permits to go in-depth in the understanding of a case study, to the detriment of the generalizability of findings. It is the classic opposition between observing the impact of few variables (balance of power, polarity, political regime, belief system, arms race, etc.) operating over a great number of cases, typical of quantitative research in IR (McLaughlin Mitchell & Vasquez, 2014; McLaughlin Mitchell et al., 2012; Singer, 1968; Sprinz & WolinskyNahmias, 2004), and the use of a great number of factors (variables) to understand the behaviour of a particular country, typical of Area Studies experts. Quantitative approach in IR traces back to the behavioural revolution in social science of the late 1950s early 1960s (Kadera & Zinnes, 2012). In America, until behavioural revolution, the field of International Relations was dominated by scholars with an expertise in Area Studies—especially about Soviet Union—that used the historical method.1 The struggle for introducing quantitative techniques was carried out by a small group of scholars (David Singer, Dina Zinnes, Rudolph Rummel, Bruce Russett, to name a few and probably the most representative ones) strongly determined to separate IR from classical approaches (Knorr & Rosenau, 1969). The revolution culminated in the creation in 1993 inside the International Studies Association 1

Neoclassical realists still maintain that the best approach for their studies is diplomatic history (Ripsman et al., 2016, p. 131).

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(ISA) of a section of quantitative scholars, named: Scientific Study of International Processes (SSIP). Besides the push factor represented by intra-academic dynamics inside ISA, another powerful input came out from the burgeoning of scholarly literature on peace and conflict, that was strongly inclined towards quantitative methods (McLaughlin Mitchell & Vasquez, 2014; Vasquez & Henehan, 1992). The two leading journals in the field of Peace Research, The Journal of Conflict Resolution founded in 1957 and The Journal of Peace Research founded in 1964, evolved soon into strongholds of quantitative approaches. Obviously, this trend was also stimulated by what occurred in real world (Kadera & Zinnes, 2012: 4): [The] catastrophe of World War II reinforced this new emphasis on understanding why and how things happen in the international arena. For if you did not understand the hows and whys of two world wars, what would prevent a third from happening? This brought scientists from other disciplines to the study of international conflict and war. Psychologists, sociologists, economists, and even physicists and mathematicians sought to use their skills to study and hopefully prevent future major conflagrations. The flurry of research by these scholars reinforced the realist perspective on understanding what is and added to it a demand for observation and the use of rules for measurement. These are the events that set the stage for what has become SSIP, known in its early years by names such as Quantitative International Politics or Interpolimetrics to emphasize the observational/measurement component

From this moment on, the story of the quantitative and qualitative “tribes” evolved along increasingly divergent paths. For QIR was essential, in order to carry out its mission, to have data featuring these essentials: reproducibility and repeatability. Data produced by historical research and Area Studies were considered too sparse, unstructured, and heterogenous to be useful. A first response to this problem was the recourse to simulation techniques that tried to replicate laboratory experiment. Simulations of the decision-making process that reproduced critical historical events (the First World War or other major international crisis) were distinctive of this period.2 This first response to the problem of data generation was considered unsatisfactory because evidence collected suffered both problems of validity (what they measured) and reliability (robustness of empirical association). This opened the way to scientific projects aimed to create large datasets. After the development of datasets, a second problem emerged: the lack of statistical expertise of scholars that had to use these data. As Kelly Kadera and Dina Zinnes note (2012: 10): “…even by 1980, training in research methodologies and statistics was not part of the normal political science graduate program, meaning graduate students had to go to departments like psychology, sociology, economics, and mathematics to learn how to apply statistical models”. While the first period (1960–1980) of progress of QIR was mainly devoted to generate reliable data, the second period (1980–2000) was characterized by a strong inclination towards hypotheses testing, “the if X then Y perspective with its heavy 2

It is a little bit ironic that simulations depended heavily on historical analysis to generate their data. Luigi Albertini’s three tome book on the origins of WWI was one of the most “plundered” works by IR scholars interested in describing the evolving of the 1914 July crisis.

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emphasis on statistics” (Kadera & Zinnes, 2012: 11). In this phase there was not a great awareness of where the empirical hypotheses under scrutiny were from: their historical background and country-bound limitations. This sort of ingenuousness was surpassed by quantitative scholars in the following years. Presently, “[far] from being mindless number crunchers testing unrealistic models, researchers who use large numbers of observations are acutely aware of the context and character of their data and the assumptions that underlie statistical models” (John, 2010: 283). A graphical representation of major trends in IR methodology is depicted in Fig. 1.

3 Bridges Over Troubled Water Notwithstanding significant differences, it is possible to identify some relevant points of contact between QIR and Area Studies. In this chapter I’m going to focus on three issues in particular: the problem of data generation; the elaboration and testing of hypotheses; and the identification of independent variables. Problem of data generation represents a good case in which QIR and Area Studies can fruitfully collaborate. In the field of QIR there are a lot of datasets available to test empirical hypotheses. The most famous and used are the datasets from the Correlates of War project, that include data about all conflicts (Militarized Interstate Dispute) and wars since 1816, and data about the actors involved in these events, along with their national capabilities, the dimension of the international system, the presence and

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type of alliance pacts, territorial changes, dyadic trade, and so on (Jones et al., 1996).3 Another important cluster of datasets is the one elaborated by the Uppsala Conflict Data Programme that fills some gaps in the Correlates of War project—proposing a detailed dataset on peace settlements—but covering a shorter timespan: 1946 on.4 Just to mention another important dataset, there is the International Crisis Behaviour by Michael Brecher and Jonathan Wilkenfeld, that covers all major international crisis between 1919 and 2019.5 There are of course other datasets, as the Event Data used in foreign policy analysis (Schrodt, 1995),6 however, for the purpose of this chapter, this list can be sufficient. But where are these data from? How can we trust them? How reliable are they? Which are the definitions behind data?7 For the most part, only scholars with an in-depth expertise in a particular area can answer these questions, and help fix some problems that, especially for periods before the nineteenthcentury and for extraEuropean regions, are very hard to manage. For example, one of the most used variables to test diversionary war theory, that links domestic instability and external aggression, is inflation rate, used as a proxy (De Rouen, 1995; Mclaughlin Mitchell & Prins, 2004). However, data on inflation rate, or consumer price index, are not very easily accessible/available when they relate to non-western countries (such as China) and for the period before WWII.8 In these cases, only an in-depth knowledge of economic history of a country/region and language skills to access national sources can provide the required information. A significant case of a productive interaction between QIR and Area Studies in the field of data generation is offered by the study of David Kang and his collaborators on the dyadic conflict between China and Vietnam in the modern era (Kang et al., 2019). Kang’s research is not only important because it sheds a new light on power politics dynamics in a particular area of the world (Chinese tributary system) over an extended period, 1365–1841, contributing in this way to the understanding of the Asian (hierarchical) international-regional system and its comparison with the classic European Westphalian (anarchical) system. It is also relevant because it permits to expand the number of observations available for QIR. More to the point, by considering an area and a period that is not usually under the spotlight of QIR scholars, it makes generalizations on the causes of conflict stronger. Kang and his 3

https://correlatesofwar.org/. https://ucdp.uu.se/. 5 https://sites.duke.edu/icbdata/. 6 https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/web/ICPSR/studies/5211. 7 See for example the Correlates of War’s definition of war, that is essential to calculate the frequency of this event in international politics across different periods and region: An interstate war is a military clash between at least two independent political unit (city-state, nation-state, empire), with at least 1000 battle-related casualties over a period of 12 months. David Singer realized the risk behind this definition and for this reason he “recruited Melvin Small, a historian, to the project to ensure that the list of wars generated by these rules corresponded to the general consensus of historians about which conflicts were wars. These definitions and their descendants over time are the most used war data in the field” (Morrow, 2012: 83). 8 See for example Chow and Wang (2010). 4

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collaborators elaborated a dataset with approximately 1200 entries on interstate wars and other types of conflicts in the Asian region, which can be used by other scholars of QIR to expand the sample of their analyses.9 In the case of hypothesis testing (and formulation), QIR and Area Studies can find interesting points of contact, too. Hypothesis formulation can be derived either deductively from theoretical assumptions or bottom up, inductively, from insights inferred by observations of real cases. In the latter case, Area Studies scholars’ expertise can help to avoid the trap of naïve statements. Testing theoretically informed hypotheses over the greatest number of cases is, of course, the paramount task of quantitative analyses. This is the part of research where QIR operates in its comfort zone. This fact notwithstanding, most of the quantitative analyses also carry out parallel in-depth analysis of outliers/regular case studies, to see—through processtracing and structured-focused comparisons—if the statistical association discovered can also be interpreted as a causal mechanism. If Kang’s analysis is a good example of productive input from Area Studies towards QIR, Douglas Gibler analysis of territorial peace is a masterful piece of quantitative analysis that offers stimulating input from QIR to Area Studies (Gibler, 2007). Gibler analyses the relationship between border stability (territorial dispute), democracy, and peace. His main goal is to test the validity of democratic peace theory. He is convinced that the relationship discovered by statistical analyses between democratic regimes and peaceful behaviours (at least towards other democratic regimes) is a spurious one. Actually, both democracy and peace would be the result of a third omitted variable: stability of borders. He argues that only when a state has established stable borders and resolved its territorial dispute with neighbours, it can go democratic. External conflicts, in fact, produce a domestic pressure towards centralization of power, a cumbersome military-industrial complex, and illiberal policies (a sort of garrison states). Thus, in this reasoning, it is peace that produces democracy and not the other way around. This finding has a robust statistical significance. As it is clear, Gibler’s theory owes much to important historical analysis of the development of the European modern state: from Otto Hintze to Charles Tilly. At the same time, his findings are relevant to explain why some areas of the world are characterized by a low level of democracy: this is not necessarily the effect of intrinsic national/ regional attributes (historical, cultural, social, and economic), but the outcome of international instability that moulds domestic institutions and reduces the space for liberal political arrangements. Data generation and hypothesis testing are just two examples that show that QIR and Area Studies should not be necessarily at odds (even with the hardcore of QIR). A third important source of collaboration regards the following question: where are 9

As Kang puts it: “This case study was a detailed exploration of a non-Western, historical example of a remarkably stable yet unequal relationship between two unlike political actors in an international order. As a vivid case study, the Vietnam–China relationship illuminates the ways in which hierarchy and international order can exist in international politics. The data presented in this research also provide an unprecedented granular view of war and other violence in premodern East Asia—data that can be used to explore any number of scholarly issues about domestic and international violence over a remarkably longtime, 400-year period” (Kang et al., 2019: 919).

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independent variables from? The contribution of Area Studies and their interaction with the dyadic approach can be crucial to this point. Prior to Stuart Bremer’s breakthrough article (Bremer, 1992), scholars looked at why some states were more prone to war than others (a monadic approach) and why international systems with certain characteristics had more conflicts than others (a systemic approach). Both these two approaches suffered the same problem: small N. There are not many international systems to compare (even considering sub-systems), neither at one point in time, nor longitudinally, and also a focus on national attributes does not expand very much the number of observations available. The analysis, for instance, of the impact of government instability on the Italian foreign policy in the post WWII period (1946–2010), usually considered a crucial driver of the country’s low-profile foreign policy, produces only 55 observations (one per year, using moving means). Not enough, to make strong inferences. The introduction in peace and conflict studies of dyads as the main unit of analysis permitted exponentially multiplying the number of observations, increasing the reliability of the empirical evidence. A dyad is a pair of states. Analysing dyads takes into account the relationship between two states and sees why some dyads are conflict prone or peaceful. Dyad analysis shifts the research away from conducting correlation to calculating probabilities: it examines which characteristics of a dyad increase or decrease the probability of the modelled event. Resuming the above-mentioned case of Italy, by not considering its behaviour in each year from 1946 to 2010 but the likelihood of Italy’s behaviour in every dyad in which it could potentially have been involved in each year, we obtain a large number of cases (N = 9,283 dyad-per year) (Benati et al., 2020). This shift from a country analysis to a “nation-in a dyad” analysis permits to multiply the number of observations and produce more robust statistical results. However, the identification of the independent variables selected to explain Italy’s conflict behaviour (or Russia’s conflict behaviour, or China’s conflict behaviour, or Iran’s conflict behaviour…) needs an in-depth understanding of country-specific characteristics. In the case of Italy, the independent variable “elite fragmentation” can be coded as high/low government instability; in the case of China, it is better to code the same variable as intra-party struggles or as level of factionalism. This coding choice depends on a country’s historical uniqueness. The advantage of a dyadic approach is mutual: it is not only useful to remedy the problem of limited observations in IR—shifting the focus away from system or nation-state attributes—and to adjust independent variables to national traditions and political cultures. It can also correct the overreliance of Area Studies on unitlevel characteristics to explain the international behaviour of a country. As Sara McLaughlin Mitchell and John Vasquez say (2014: 27): Focusing on dyads assumes that the relationship between two countries is the key to understanding peace and war. In contrast, looking just at the single-nation-state, as was prevalent in foreign policy studies, implies that it is something intrinsic about the country that make it war prone or peace loving. A dyadic analysis (looking at relations between two states) implies that any given country can be at any one time both war prone and peace loving depending with the relationship it has with another country. Likewise, it assumes that the

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dyadic relationship is more important than any particular system characteristic, such as bipolarity. It turned out that looking at the dyad was tremendously successful and produced many more findings than previous empirical studies on war.

Sometimes, Area Studies seems to forget that international politics is a relational affair. Knowing everything of an actor does not produce automatically an understanding of its external behaviour. To explain the outcome of an interaction, we have to consider not only the characteristics of state A but also those of state B, we have to analyse the characteristics of the dyad: is it a democratic dyad (both democratic), a mixed dyad (one state democratic and the other authoritarian), or an authoritarian dyad (both authoritarian)? Is the power gap large or small (state A can have a relative advantage in terms of power capabilities when confronted with state B and a relative disadvantage when confronted with state C)? Which is the level of economic interdependence between state A and state B, and between state A and state C? Are both actors in a dyad armed with nuclear weapons or both conventional, or mixed (one nuclear and one conventional)? Are states territorially contiguous or not? This is a short list of important questions that a dyadic approach suggests to researchers, both in QIR and Area Studies.

4 Conclusion The relationship between QIR and Area Studies is very complicated. The two “tribes” belong to very different worlds and speak a very different language. They disagree on almost every point of scientific research: epistemology, i.e., what is the best method to carry out research and discover empirical regularities; ontology, i.e., what is the subject of the analysis; and the kind of empirical data to use. That being said, if during the Cold War was possible to maintain some degree of cooperation across the Iron Curtain, maybe the disciplinary Cold War too, between QIR and Area Studies, can find instances of appeasement, or some accommodation that makes a dialogue possible. In this chapter, I tried to single out some points of dialogue that can be mutually fruitful for these two different perspectives on international politics. Data generation can be a topic in which Area Studies can offer important insight to QIR, especially for periods before the nineteenth century and for non-western regions. Many gaps in historical time series can be closed only with the contribution of Area Studies experts that can access local sources. A second space of dialogue can be that of hypotheses formulation and testing. Expertise in a particular area/country can improve the fine-tuning of empirical hypotheses and help to identify causal connection where QIR identify only statistical association. A third area of dialogue can be offered by dyadic analysis that, focusing on relationship between pairs of states, can mitigate the overconfidence of Area Studies on the peculiarity of their preferred actor.

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Cold War did not escalate to the level of an all-out war. Therefore, we can be quite confident that also the uneasy confrontation between quantitative scholars of International Relations and Area Studies experts can remain at a certain level of civility for everyone’s mutual benefit.

References Benati, S., Foradori, P., Longoni, G. M., & Rosa, P. (2020). Neoclassical realism and Italy’s military behavior, 1946–2010. A combined dyad/nation analysis. Political Research Exchange, 2(1), 1–21. Bremer, S. (1992). Dangerous dyads: Conditions affecting the likelihood of interstate war, 1816– 1965. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 36(2), 309–341. Chow, G., & Wang, P. (2010). The empirics of inflation in China. Economics Letters, 109, 28–30. DeRouen, K. (1995). The indirect link: Politics, the economy and the use of force. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 39(4), 671–695. Dreyer, J. T. (2012). China’s political system. Pearson. Gibler, D. M. (2007). Bordering on peace: Democracy, territorial issues, and conflict. International Studies Quarterly, 51(3), 509–532. John, P. (2010). Quantitative methos. In D. Marsh & G. Stoker (Eds.), Theory and methods in political science. Palgrave Macmillan. Jones, D. M., Bremer, S. A., & Singer, J. D. (1996). Militarized interstate disputes, 1816–1992: Rationale, coding rules, and empirical patterns. Conflict Management and Peace Science, 15(2), 163–212. Kadera, K. M., & Zinnes, D. (2012). The origins and evolution of SSIP: How methods met models, with a short interlude. In McLaughlin Mitchell, Diehl, & Morrow (Eds.). Kang, D. C., Nguyen, D. X., Tse-min, Fu. R., & Shaw, M. (2019). War, rebellion, and intervention under hierarchy: Vietnam-China relations, 1365 to 1841. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 63(4), 896–922. Knorr, K., & Rosenau, J. (Eds.). (1969). Contending approaches to international politics. Princeton University Press. McLaughlin Mitchell, S., & Prins, B. C. (2004). Rivalry and diversionary uses of force. The Journal of Conflict Resolution, 48(6), 937–961. McLaughlin Mitchell, S., & Vasquez, J. (Eds.). (2014). Conflict, war, and peace: An introduction to scientific research. SAGE/CQ Press. McLaughlin Mitchell, S., Diehl, P., & Morrow, J. D. (Eds.). (2012). Guide to the scientific study of international processes. Wiley-Blackwell. Morrow, J. D. (2012). The interaction of theory and data. In McLaughlin Mitchell, Diehl, & Morrow (Eds.). Ripsman, N. M., Taliaferro, J. W., & Lobell, S. E. (2016). Neoclassical realist theory of international politics. Oxford University Press. Schrodt, P. (1995). Event data in foreign policy analysis. In L. Neack, J. Hey, & P. Haney (Eds.), Foreign policy analysis. Prentice Hall. Singer, J. D. (Ed.). (1968). Quantitative international politics. The Free Press. Sprinz, D. F., & Wolinsky-Nahmias, Y. (Eds.). (2004). Models, numbers, and cases: Methods for studying international relations. The Michigan University Press. Vasquez, J. A., & Henehan, M. T. (Eds.). (1992). The scientific study of peace and war: A text reader. Lexington Books.

In Lieu of a Conclusion: The Ongoingness of a Debate Silvia D’Amato , Matteo Dian , and Alessandra Russo

Abstract This chapter discusses lessons learned and draws conclusions based on the contributions presented in the previous chapters. It does so while also offering a reflection on how the academic debate between IR and AS applies in the case of the post-Soviet area and what it can tell us to better understand a region currently theatre of the war between Russia and Ukraine. The chapter specifically focuses on dynamics of knowledge production and dissemination about the region, and their relationship with the policy world. On a conclusive note, we discuss some current challenges of the field and some potential avenues for future research.

1 Introduction This edited book focused on the relations between International Relations (IR) and Area Studies (AS) in the study of politics, conflicts and, more broadly, security issues. It gathered theoretically innovative as well as empirically focused contributions on multiple “regional worlds”1 with the expectation to study the diverse nature of internationally relevant political agencies, security matters and system of governance across the international system. Specifically, this book was designed to encourage a S. D’Amato (B) Institute for Global and Security Studies, University of Leiden, Leiden, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] M. Dian Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy e-mail: [email protected] A. Russo School of International Studies & Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Trento, Trento, Italy e-mail: [email protected] 1

Or, in the words of Thakur and Smith (2021), multiple “births” of International Relations, multiple disciplinary histories and multiple voices and actors that have contributed to the development of “local” IRs and nonetheless have been subject to erasures and exclusions.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. D’Amato et al. (eds.), International Relations and Area Studies, Contributions to International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39655-7_10

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dialogue between these disciplines that are highly interconnected yet too frequently disconnected from each other. This dialogue has the ambition to overcome hierarchies and geographies of knowledge that have shaped and are shaping the fields, and become even more evident when scholarly communities find themselves trying to make sense, interpret and explain major events unfolding meanwhile. This has been the case when looking at the academic (as well as media and public) debate occurring at different latitudes and transnationally over the war in Ukraine (2022). The study of international peripheries as well as actors and sites often represented and perceived as marginal at the international level calls for continuous epistemological reflections, to refrain from a double temptation: orientalism and the construction of “exotic others”, on the one hand, and essentialism and nativism, on the other. When it comes to studying the multiform constellations of countries contentiously labelled as post/former-Soviet, -socialist, -communist, such considerations are accompanied by a further layer of complexity. These countries, indeed, have been recently described as forming an interstitial epistemic space, that is, the Global East (Müller, 2020): not included in the “Global North”, they are also excluded from the “Global South” and the related debates on the postcolonial/subaltern fields. Yet, calls for reforming the fragmented archipelago of Eurasian/Russian/East European/Slavic studies, and for new scientific foundations to reconsider the way knowledge about the “post-Soviet” is produced and organised, have emerged at different times: especially since Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the conflict in the Donbass,2 and being increasingly vocal since the launch of full-scale military offensive in Ukraine. Redrawing disciplinary boundaries and deconstructing cartographies in which international studies are often rooted is an endless exercise that may continuously open questions more than provide definitive answers. In this last chapter, we intend to display the ongoingness of the debate by way of a digression on the “post-Soviet world”, urged by the contemporary events. Finally, we try to draw some final remarks while reflecting on research avenues for future scholarship.

2 IR and AS Today: Rethinking Post-Soviet Studies in the Wake of the War The war in Ukraine unsurprisingly urged scholars of Russian studies to rethink the conceptual premises of their field of study, their own contribution to decolonise/ provincialise/decentering such field, and even their positionality (Mogilner, 2022; 2

In January 2015, the creation of a think tank was announced in Germany (what has been then institutionalised as the Zentrum für Osteuropa-und internationale Studien, ZOiS), for the study of Russia and the other former Soviet republics -as a sign of “acknowledgement that they are not infant democracies moving slowly butsurely towards the West, but complex states driven by forces that are not fully understood” (Rinke, 2015). Few months later, and looking at the same area of the world, a group of French scholars mobilised in the same direction, calling for “une nouvelle école de pensée stratégique sur la Russie” (Il est temps de refonder une école française de pensée stratégique sur la Russie, Le Monde, June 2nd, 2015).

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Morris, 2023; Peter, 2022; Smith-Laruelle, 2023). In many ways, these events lend themselves to be read through the lenses offered by the debate addressed in this edited volume. Whereas these considerations in the post-Soviet space have strongly come back under the spotlight since February 2022, it is possible to frame such self-reflective attempts broadly: in the last three decades, the crisis of Sovietology (King, 1994), post-Cold war aporia, the fetishisation of classical geo-politics as a shortcut to the analysis of complex political trajectories, and contested vocabularies (including “transition”, “neighbourhood”, “near abroad”, “hybrid regimes” and a wide array of “weasel words”, Bernhard, 2020) contributed to revive the “perennial contest between partisans of ‘nomothetic’ approaches […] and ‘idiographic’ approaches” (Kennedy, 1997). Disciplinary cleavages have been amplified by the fact that carrying out research on and in Russia, Central Asia, the Caucasus and Eastern Europe have often been conditioned by a difficult scholarly access to fieldwork settings, that may make ethnographic endeavours challenging and at the same time lead to the saturation of certain, relatively accessible, sites (i.e., country’s capitals instead of remote locations, or, for example, Bishkek for those studying Central Asia). It is against this backdrop that contaminations between Area Studies and International Relations may contribute to the scientific disclosure of that area through multiple instruments of enquiry: what can facilitate these contaminations, and what can thwart them?

2.1 Ethics and Practices of Knowledge Production The very process of knowledge production in and on peripheralised sites reflects not only a dialectics between International Relations and Area Studies, but also the articulation of encounters and entanglements between “Western” and “local” scholars. As much as the category of “local scholars” may be problematic and reductive (i.e., neglectful of intersectionalities), some of them have publicly denounced patronising research practices and routines that relegate them to “source material, the field’, the very fuel that feeds the production of knowledge about us, but not for us” (Sultanalieva, 2019). Against this background, it is important to acknowledge that “local researchers” encompass researchers born, educated and based in the countries under study, as well as diaspora scholarship, and in general a diverse group of colleagues3 with different access to the global (Western-centric) infrastructures of knowledge production and to resources for contesting and resisting unethical and unfair research reproducing inequalities and hierarchies. On the one hand, “local scholars” in the West “enjoy more privileges” such as “lower barriers to entry” into the “anglophone core” (Kaczmarska & Ortmann, 2021) of knowledge production, easier engagements with it and more familiarity with its rules. On the other hand, 3

In the same way as the “local field”, that is not a monolithic space (often romanticised), or “local knowledge”, that is not a flat and fixed object where to pick what is “authentic”, “autochthonous”, “indigenous”.

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they “often serve as the only voices representing non-Western perspectives in international forums” such as scholarly conventions, academic conferences and similar gatherings (Marat, 2021, 481), at the same time remaining excluded from disciplinary debates (Kaczmarska & Ortmann, 2021), and enterprises of theory-building. There are global/local scholars therefore unintentionally embodying Western IR scholars’ “selective engagement” with the “non-West” via area specialists (Kaczmarska & Ortmann, 2021) and “on the cheap”, that is, dispensing with direct contacts with actors and events on the ground. These nuances are not to deny a habit of tokenism that is present in research partnerships and collaborations that symbolically include post-Soviet scholars yet perpetuating their invisibilisation as a research community (Kuzhabekova, 2020), that is, the commodification of their expertise without full recognition of their intellectual contribution. In the bitter words of Aliya Kuzhabekova: the post-Soviet world has been drawn into the “international trade in knowledge-related expert services”, “whereby profits and benefits from the trade are reaped by the countries, which self-categorize as the North, while undermining the potential of the former Soviet scholarly community to contribute to global knowledge production on equal terms” (Kuzhabekova, 2020, 114). The case of EU-funded consortium-based research projects, specifically dealing with or covering post-Soviet countries, bear witness of such distorted division of academic labour. Whereas the distribution of resources among the consortium members reflects country-specific, structural conditions of work in universities and research organisations, the allocation of local scholars to research tasks and responsibilities related to fieldwork activities is deliberate. Local partners are seldom (if never) in lead of a work package (not even if it is case-based and heavily dependent on area specialism). Similarly, local researchers are too frequently listed as co-authors limitedly to publications that are based on the collection and analysis of data from the field. There is a formal compliance with the rules about attribution and ownership rights, yet can we really speak of knowledge co-production? In spite of EU’s pervasive procedures of ethical reviews, little oversight over possible extractive and predatory research conducts remains and it is often disguised as anonymisation/ pseudonymisation of local informants, activists, etc. Any effort to stimulate substantial synergies between International Relations and Area Studies cannot overlook these considerations: how not to replicate the widespread tendency to confine area specialists—often from or based in the countries under study—to secondary roles (i.e., translators/interpreters, “field troubleshooters”, Kuzhabekova, 2020, “as sources for compilation of facts”, Marat, 2021, “containers of local information”4 ) assisting, organising the encounters with local interlocutors, assembling raw materials with no ambitions of theory production and no room for contributing to disciplinary knowledge.

4

This comes from a Tweet written by Asel Doolotkeldieva, March 19th 2023.

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2.2 Sites for Knowledge Circulation and Dissemination An approach inspired by epistemological contamination and methodological pluralism, thus bridging IR and AS, may be legitimised in the scholarly milieu by recognisable forms of organisation, such as the presence of institutionalised/ formalised venues for scholars to present and disseminate their work. In this sense, bridges between post-Soviet studies and IR suffer from a weak scholarly legitimacy. Firstly, if one looks at the availability of academic outlets where to publish scholarly works grounded in this approach, the landscape includes a number of “PostSoviet/Eurasian Area Studies journals” (Kaczmarska & Ortmann, 2021). However, according to a commonly used indicator such as SCImago,5 only Post-Soviet Affairs is endorsed as a top journal in the disciplinary sector of International Relations. Whereas a debate exists about the need to reconsider how research is evaluated and to problematise quantitative measurements for monitoring the quality of scholarly contributions (i.e., San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment), bibliometric performativity is a concern, especially for early career researchers. Secondly, there seem to be limited opportunities for researchers to be “socialised”6 , only the International Studies Association has a specific subgroup on “Post-Communist Systems in International Relations Section”. Similar observations can be made in relation to national political science associations: the British International Studies Association has its own working group called “Russian and Eurasian Security” and the Italian Political Science Association has a Standing Group named “Russia and the post-Soviet region”—while in other countries, at least in the European context, this debate seems to be less visible or at least less consistently organised7 . Lastly, it seems that this disconnection between International Relations and Area Studies is “reciprocated” within area-based associations, in which disciplinary perspectives rooted in political science are scarcely represented. Some bridges have been recently built arguably as attempts to join intellectual resources and cope with the disorientation of most scholars in front of the war in Ukraine.

5

With no claims of comprehensiveness, the following journals have been surveyed by way of illustration: Demokratizatsiya is positioned in the second quartile for the subject category of Political Science and International Relations; Europe-Asia Studies is ranked in the first quartile for the subject category of Sociology and Political Science, while Problems of Post-Communism, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, and Caucasus Survey are ranked in the second quartile for same subject category. Other journals, such as Central Asian Survey, Slavic Review, Eurasian Geography and Economics, Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe—just to name a few—are not appealing outlets for IR scholars with an area-based orientation or sensitivity. 6 For example, the American Political Science Association, the European Consortium for Political Research, the European International Studies Association, and the International Political Science Association. 7 The following ones have been screened: German Political Science Association, Association Française de Science Politique, Association belge francophone de science politique, Asociación Española de Ciencia Política y de la Administración, Danish Political Science Association.

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2.3 Theory-Driven Venues for Contaminations In the last years, within the relatively young and yet extensive and multiform disciplinary field of International Relations, there have been theoretical advancements, sub-fields emerging and consolidating, bodies of literature blossoming and developing, that entail, entice, prompt—or simply, would benefit from—richer interplays and cross-fertilisation with Area Studies. One example (among many possible others) relates to the literature on international/transnational processes of diffusion and transfer. The reception of international norms and policies, and the localisation of international “blueprints” have been widely studied: while rationalist-institutionalist approaches see local political systems and opportunity structures as filters intervening in these processes, alternative interpretations tend to rather focus on local cultures and normative orders. Processes of diffusion and transfer have often been considered as channels of modernisation and liberalisation (suffice it to think about the literature on the transformative power of Europe), while “local filters” and “local culture” as pathological objects obstructing the circulation of progressive norm and policy. Other times, though, the study of processes of localisation and translation has aimed to spotlight the contention over the meanings of norms and the multifaceted process of their negotiation and reconstruction in different contexts: in other words, it has revealed context-specific dynamics through which different local actors embrace, contest or resist internationally promoted schemes of actions, frames and codes of conduct. This scholarship has been fed by insights, interpretative instruments and tools for inquiry that are considered typical of Area Studies; and exactly thanks to it, it often succeeded to controvert the assumption that anything different from the full adoption of Western standards and global templates is a dilution of international standards or a dysfunctional detour from them (on these aspects, see: Berger, 2017; Draude, 2017; Zimmermann, 2016). All the above is not specific to the post-Soviet world: however, the war in Ukraine has prompted a renewed debate on Enlargement and the restructuring of the relations between the EU and its Eastern neighbourhoods. It is fundamental, thus, to relaunch a debate about the extent to which Europeanisation and the delineation of European models are shaped and contoured locally, that is, grounded and embedded in specific institutional, sociopolitical and normative orders, when promoted and implemented in third countries. This is essential for understanding how Europeanisation has been and is renegotiated, or even disputed and questioned, encountering local traditions and sensibilities, across different geographical and social contexts. Looking at how Europeanisation works “from outside” may shed light on interlocutors’ perceptions of the EU and Europe at the empirical level, a necessary step towards the endeavour of “decentering”/“provincialising” not only Europe and European Studies,8 but also and more broadly International Relations. 8

In the words of Onar and Nicolaïdis https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045. 2020.1716739 (2013, 289): “How do the EU and Europe’s counterparts view their internal and international policy aspirations? What role does the EU and Europe have in the mental maps, power political calculations and institutional responses of rising powers today?”.

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2.4 The Bio-/Geo-Politics of Gatekeeping and the Changing Conditions of Field Accessibility Since the end of the Soviet Union, a host of questions has been raised about how to deal with the deep and wide political changes occurring across the post-communist bloc, with the issue of the data to be used has increasingly moved under the spotlight: not only their availability, validity and reliability, but also their politicisation, securitisation and even weaponisation. This is far from being a context-specific matter: different bodies of literature covered challenges and dilemmas of research implying on-the-ground visits and stays (and the related procedures of obtaining research permits), and the generation of self-reported data in a variety of countries characterised by authoritarian regimes, pervasive surveillance infrastructures, the criminalisation of dissent, as well as diffused/structural violence (including police violence), and in some cases armed conflicts (albeit classified as “frozen”, “hybrid”, “low intensity”, in the case of the post-Soviet area). The organisation of archives and the release of aggregated quantitative data (i.e., surveys, polls) are no less filtered by politically-driven decisions. This raises a host of ethical questions about the way in which research practices and methods might provide governments with opportunities to sanction people that contributed to the research, “the risks of coercion or intimidation, and the consequent possibilities of self-censorship, either on the part of respondents or the scholar herself” (Goode & Ahram, 2016, 828); or, on the other hand, might produce “partisan scholarship” replicating the agendas of state agencies, oppositions or nongovernmental organisations (Goode & Ahram, 2016, 828). These concerns have been amplified since February 2022: the demand for area specialists boomed, while the inaccessibility of the field for security and safety reasons has been accompanied by “cultural sanctions”, the alienation of several Russian/Russia-based scholars from the Western infrastructures of knowledge production and scientific collaborations, and the relocation of several other scholars from Russia, Belarus and Ukraine out of their home countries. In this situation, “new rules of gatekeeping and exclusion” (Lankina, 2023, 71) may create even deeper fissures between IR and AS; on the other hand, the impracticability of immersive research and first-hand data irrevocably calls for methodological and epistemological eclecticism, and new debates between fields of expertise.

3 Dialectics of IR and AS: The Way Forward All in all, this book allowed us to explore different levels of interaction between the fields of IR and AS. All its chapters provide theoretical and empirical contributions to this debate by shedding light on particularities of the specific field and world area. Overall, we believe, this volume confirms how (academic) knowledge production, especially in specific world areas, is political, as it showed how the disciplines have evolved in different world regions and how key historical turning points

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have contributed in systematise or altering key disciplinary developments. On these premises, this volume brought together scholars interested in various dynamics that are relevant within any discussion of international politics but that are also committed to looking at how various effects are unpacked in different regions of the world. Specifically, our conceptual review and mapping endeavours ultimately call for overcoming the compartmentalisation of hyper-specialised knowledge production— a logic that seems to govern the young scholars’ careers and professions at different latitudes, especially in the context of neoliberal, bureaucratised, academia. Whereas our contribution is not to be considered a “manifesto”, it invites the readers to consider whether the intellectual and cultural work as articulated nowadays actually accomplishes the mission of understanding the complexity of the transnational field and of global/local encounters; and ultimately, how disciplinary contaminations may become a professional practice. However, we believe that are still a series of remaining questions that might be guiding the future of the dialogue between IR and AS. First of all, questions remain on the relationship between comparability and generatability. Indeed, one of the key challenges that the current research is still facing is the ability to find an effective balance between adequately analyse and account for contextual and unique explanatory elements, typical of AS, while maintaining sufficient common ground for any useful analytical generalisation, mostly of interest in mainstream IR research. This is still an important point to keep discussing as, we believe, the possibility of generating comparable insights is not only a matter of validity of the research but it a critical aspect to support the development of the discipline. Indeed, instead of evolving and expanding, scholarship might become marginalised if not able to generate broader relevance and utility. In this sense, research efforts might focus on elaborating dependable, agreed-upon findings that can contribute to the debate with portable understandings, links and mechanisms. The second point we believe should be keeping occupy a critical space concerns the postcolonial heritage of Area Studies. While a lot has been said and discussed on the current implications of the colonial past, existing research has probably been less successful in providing possible ways to fully account for it, if not address it completely, both in the academic and policy debate. Finally, we believe there is a final question to be raised on the pedagogical component of this debate. In this chapter we mentioned the role of important universities in the education and research of different areas of the world in providing knowledge and expertise for the policymaking process. Yet, beyond the immediate policy relevance of IR and AS, little has been discussed on the way these traditions can be taught and what kind of added value can they have in university curricula engaged in international affairs and security. How can a new dialectics on theoretical frameworks, concepts and methods between IR and AS inform teaching international studies? How can the teaching be redesigned to better train in multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches to the study of politics, conflicts and security issues? On a conclusive note, we intended for this collection to represent a timely contribution and open invite to interested experts and scholars to think about the future of research at the intersection between International Relations and Area Studies in a

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more interconnected and profound manner. Overall, international politics is substantially the result of different universes of politics that co-exist and influence each other. Although it would obviously be impossible to analyse such a complexity in a fully exhausting manner, it is still important to break, or at least weaken, rigid disciplinary canons and learn how to balance and benefit from thematic specialisms.

References Berger, T. (2017). Linked in translation: International donors and local fieldworkers as translators of global norms. Third World Thematics: A TWQ Journal, 2(5), 606–620. Bernhard, M. (2020). Weasel words and the analysis of “postcommunist” politics: A symposium. East European Politics and Societies, 34(2), 283–325. Draude, A. (2017). The agency of the governed in transfer and diffusion studies. Third World Thematics: A TWQ Journal, 2(5), 577–587. Goode J. P., & Ahram A. I. (2016). Special issue editors’ introduction: Observing autocracies from the ground floor. Social Science Quarterly, 97, 823–833. Kaczmarska, K., & Ortmann, S. (2021). IR theory and Area Studies: A plea for displaced knowledge about international politics. Journal of International Relations and Development, 24, 820–847. Kennedy M. (1997), A Manifesto (of sorts) for Area Studies. The Journal of International Institute, 4(3). King, C. (1994). Post-Sovietology: Area studies or social science? International Affairs, 70(2), 291–297. Kuzhabekova, A. (2020). Invisibilizing Eurasia: How North-South Dichotomization Marginalizes Post-Soviet Scholars in International Research Collaborations. Journal of Studies in International Education, 24(1), 113–130. Lankina, T. (2023). Branching out or inwards? The logic of fractals in Russian studies. Post-Soviet Affairs, 39(1–2), 70–85. Laruelle, M. (2023). Russian studies’ moment of self-reflection. Russian Analytical Digest, 293, 2–3. Marat, E. (2021). Introduction: 30 years of Central Asian studies – The best is yet to come. Central Asian Survey, 40(4), 477–482. Mogilner, M. (2022). There Can Be No “Vne”. Slavic Review, March 1st. http://www.slavicreview. illinois.edu/discussion Morris, J. (2023). On the meaning of decolonising Russian Studies. https://postsocialism.org/2023/ 02/24/on-the-meaning-of-decolonising-russian-studies/ Müller, M. (2020). In search of the Global East: Thinking between North and South. Geopolitics, 25(3), 734–755. Onar, N. F., & Nicolaïdis, K. (2013). The Decentring Agenda: Europe as a post-colonial power. Cooperation and Conflict, 48(2), 283–303. Rinke A. (2015). In response to Ukraine crisis, Berlin to launch new think tank. Reuters, January 27th. Smith-Peter, S. (2022). What do scholars of Russia owe Ukraine? NYI Jordan Center for Advanced Study of Russia News. https://jordanrussiacenter.org/news/what-do-scholars-of-russia-owe-ukr aine-today/ Sultanalieva, S. (2019). How does it feel to be studied? A Central Asian Perspective. OpenDemocracy, October 8th, https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/how-does-it-feel-be-studied-centralasian-perspective/ Thakur, V., & Smith, K. (2021). Introduction to the special issue: The multiple births of international relations. Review of International Studies, 47, 571–579. Zimmermann, L. (2016). Same same or different? Norm diffusion between resistance, compliance, and localization in post-conflict states. International Studies Perspectives, 17(1), 98–115.

Index

A Africa, 35–49 Area Studies (AS), 1–4, 8–12, 161, 163–168 Authority, 130–132, 135, 138–141, 143, 145, 147

B Ben Guerdane, 65, 66 Borderlands, 129–133, 135, 136, 138–147 Borders, 48

C Central America, 79, 84, 86 China, 17–20, 23, 24, 26–29, 152, 155–157 Chinese school of IR, 20, 22 Civil conflicts, 41 Civil wars, 41, 42 Colonialism/colonial, 7–10 Constellation, 100, 103, 104 Contestation, 3, 26, 28, 49, 143 Countering violent extremism (CVE), 117, 118, 123, 124 Critical security, 64 Critical theory, 21

D Data, 151, 153–156, 158 Decolonization/decolonizing, 6, 11 Democracy promotion, 97 Dialectics, 163, 167, 168 Diplomacy, 100

Dyadic approach, 152, 157, 158

E Ecologies of violence, 132 Education, 112–125 Epistemology, 4 Essentialism, 18, 29 Eurocentrism, 5 European integration, 97, 99 European Studies (ES), 94–96, 99, 103 Experts, 164, 168 Explosive device, 132–136, 138, 141–148

F Functionalism, 75

G Generalizations, 155 Geo-politics, 167 Global conversations, 95, 103–105 Global governance, 42 Global IR, 2, 3, 10, 17, 18, 20, 22, 25 Globalisation, 28, 29, 115, 125 Global South, 47

H Hashd al-Shaabi, 66, 67 Humanitarian, 132, 133, 136, 138, 139, 143–147 Human security, 57, 62–65 Hybridity, 57, 64, 68

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. D’Amato et al. (eds.), International Relations and Area Studies, Contributions to International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39655-7

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172 I Institutional complexities, 100 Integration, 73–76, 83, 85 Intergovernmentalism, 73 International intervention, 112, 114–116, 119, 120, 125, 126 International order/global order, 18, 20–23, 26–28, 30 International organizations, 115, 123, 124 International Practice Theory (IPT), 94–105 International Relations (IR), 161, 163–168

K Knowledge, 162–165, 167, 168 Kosovo, 111–114, 116, 118–126

L Landmines, 129, 132–139, 141, 142, 144–147 Latin America, 74–78, 88 Legitimacy, 147

M Methods/methodology, 4, 5, 9, 12 Middle East and North Africa (MENA), 56, 57, 59, 61–64, 67 Middle Eastern Studies (MES), 55–59, 61, 62, 67, 68 Minority rights, 118, 120 Multiculturalism, 118, 119 Myanmar, 129, 132, 133, 136, 138, 139, 141–144, 146

N Narrative, 18, 24, 27, 30 National capabilities, 154 Nation-building, 114 Non-western IR, 36, 44, 45, 48

P Peacebuilding, 114–117, 121 Policy-making, 168 Political sociology, 74, 79, 81, 87, 88 Positivism, 4, 5, 8 Post-colonial, 18, 20–22, 29, 30 Post-conflict settings, 112, 117 Post-paradigmatic IR, 37, 40, 41, 48 Power, 152, 155, 156, 158 Proxy wars, 56, 59–62, 68

Index Q Quantitative analysis, 152, 156

R Reflectivity, 95, 100 Regime, 56, 57, 60, 64–68 Regional, 2, 11 Regionalism (regionalist), 73–78, 81, 82, 87 Regional public administration (RPA), 80, 82, 87 Relational ontology, 98, 102–105 Reliability, 153, 157 Research, 162–165, 167, 168

S Sahel, 46–48 Sectarianisation, 56 Sectarianism, 56 SICA, 82–87 Small N, 157 Socialization, 83–85 Societal security, 57, 62–68 Sovereignty, 5, 6, 8–10, 36, 41, 42, 45, 115, 117, 121, 125 Specialisms, 164, 169 State, 18–28, 30 Statehood, 41, 42

T Ta’ang, 132, 133, 136, 141, 144, 146 Teaching, 168 Technocratic-Technocratization, 75 Tianxia, 23 Tunisia, 56, 57, 64, 65, 67, 68

U United Nations (UN), 116–120

V Validity, 153, 156

W Weapon assemblages, 131 World politics, 167 World regions, 167 World system, 38, 39